Joyas Voladoras

Guys, I think the heart thing might be a metaphor. Idek.

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old." 

This line reminded me of being in that awful situation where you care about someone more than they do. The awful realization you have when your feelings are unrequited. This line also reminded me of those cold, unfeeling 8th Graders squatting in the bathroom with cigarettes in between their fingers, planning their grand walk-out from school the second they turned 16. This line reminded me of how treacherous it is to care. And how much more it is not to.

"You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."

The last line of Joyas Voladoras puts it beyond almost any doubt that it's optimistic. The last line tells us that, no matter how much we try not to care, we can't help it. Our metaphorical "wall" is felled in an instant by the second glance of a woman, or by pancakes. Either one.

The cigarette thing is a true story, by the way. They offered me one. I declined, not having read TFIOS yet.

This piece is kind of all over the place, probably because I wrote about 3 different responses, and condensed them all into this one, from various perspectives.