| BWS Stories - "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"...Marriage "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"...Marriage - Strange Hearts Meredith Karen Laskow, a poet and essayist with "a decent amount" of publication credits, is the Poet Laureate of Placentia (California) Library District www.placentialibrary.org/laureate/poetlaureate.htm. She makes her living as a jewelry artist www.meredithbead.com, and also teaches a free weekly holistic exercise class for breast cancer survivors.
Strange Hearts After twenty-three years of marriage, we are becoming strangers. Our bodies move through the same space but our hearts increasingly diverge, no longer in syncopation. We go places and do things together — to the outside world we must seem like the perfect couple — but inside we grow more and more apart. You talk of love, you talk of togetherness, but a wall is being built between us, brick by brick. I no longer have the strength to tear it down. I am so weary from fighting all the time and shielding my soul from noise and debris generated by the construction. When the wall is complete, our hearts will be divided — ventricle to the left, ventricle to the right — and they will no longer beat gloriously as one. Eventually, each side will find its own rhythm, ventricles will grow into new hearts, and we will be as separate as the years before we met.
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