“Take care not to let your hearts be troubled.”

Perhaps the author should have spent some spent time in Tibet, with the Buddhist sages. Perhaps he may have found another way to put things: “Take care to not let your hearts be troubled, or entangled, or attached. Also, perhaps you ought to take care not to take care at all. Perhaps you ought to prohibit your emotions and let nothing put you on edge, nor in the middle. Perhaps you ought to just not do anything or be anywhere at all.”

Perhaps there is a way to plug up the heart, so that it cannot feel, cannot heal, cannot take its part in the endless cycles of emotion and demotion.

Take care not to let your plans become a beautiful mirage in the desert of uncertainty. 

I must tell myself, over and over again, that all things must come to an end. Even the bad things.

And, though I don’t believe it with my mind, I believe in my fickle, breaking heart that my unformed tears, which are still floating around in the dark spaces of my water-logged soul, are being marked even now by someone who knows the number of the hairs on my drooping head. I imagine that when he stoops to catch my teardrops, which trickle off his favorite potted plant like rain, he catches them in glass vials and hangs them in his study next to his pinned insects on the wall. There is one vial in particular that he wears round his neck so that it touches the skin on his chest. In it is a bit of every cry I’ve ever had and will ever have. He keeps it there so that when he meets me, when he bends down so that his whiskers are tickling my face and his eyes are looking into mine, he will be able to say, “As you have felt, and as you’ve despaired, your loneliest fears have always been shared—flesh to flesh, heart to heart, all of it is yours as you are mine. I was always with you.” 
(But I know that none of this is true.)

I must tell myself…all things come to an end. Even the bad.