once i begin to tell you about the hole in my heart you will never be able to think of me in the same way again. or maybe you already knew. in which case i would only have become a small embarassment by having told you this thing that you always knew but kept from me - the way you might keep my offensive breath or my open fly from me. it has just been easier to leave it unsaid. this hole in my heart.

no. i haven't heard from the doctors. this is not a medical condition. and i haven't heard from my friends. i am being poetic and profound. i am being metaphysical. one of these moods. but that is not to say that it is not attached to something real enough. the reality imposes this code, this guess-what-i-really-mean game. all poets are suspect, but i'm not one of them. i am just poetic. and profound. for the moment. humor me. or not. i don't care.

i told some people today that i have a hole in my heart. they listened carefully, but i wouldn't give them enough to work with. so i generalized and said don't we all. but i wanted to say more. but there wasn't enough time. and they didn't really want me to go any further. and i didn't either - or some part of me didn't.

this is what it felt like. you want to shake me (but i won't let you) and say what do you mean? what are you talking about? you need a vacation. you have been reading too many papers, thinking too much only about school and a classroom. and, of course, it's all true. oh i could tell you stories. oh i have been abused. stories to make you cry.

a friend said we can't really say anything because there isn't time - and we have to come back and work with these people on monday. it was, you see, a faculty day of renewal. we sent the kids home. and that created just enough space for me to recognize again that i have a hole in my heart. don't we all. and don't we try to fill it with anything at hand. and won't we travel some distance to fill it with a journey as well as a destination. and when we fail won't we say that only god can fill it. and when the saying becomes empty won't we call the hole itself god. and head up the mountain with our eyes wide shut. or just stay blindly put because we cannot descend. we cannot go down there into the hole. we just can't. won't. can't.

well. maybe i could. but not with you or anyone else presently known to me. and that is because there's a hole in my heart. big enough for one.

I used to say: "there is a God-shaped hole in me." For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

Salman Rushdie