By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen

We are here today to welcome the newest members into an established, inclusive society, and while you might not be glad to be here, we are grateful for your presence, and hope that over time you will find yourself at home.

You’ve come here today for the same reason everyone comes to the Society. Each of you is experiencing symptoms of heartache. Some of you have used the word “piercing” to describe how you feel. Others have said it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you. We know these symptoms—and others—well, and while they vary, they are acute. That is, they come on fast and strong. You won’t die, though. Symptoms are also chronic. You will remember them most likely for the rest of your life. Also, they’ll come back. 

Most likely, you’ve felt symptoms of heartache in more subtle ways over the years: the first night you had to fall asleep without a pacifier, or the first time the babysitter came over and you watched your mom walk away in heels and a dress with what seemed like a shaky exuberance. Maybe it was the time you had to stay in at recess because you got caught chewing gum, said, “crap,” in class and also didn’t finish your homework. Maybe it had to do with the first story you read that didn’t have a “happily ever after.”

Now though, the symptoms are so fierce you think you can’t bear them, and you’re here so you’ll never have a broken heart again.

First, we at the Society believe language is important—your hearts are not broken. Your hearts are breaking, and they will probably break in some form or another as long as you’re alive. I say this gently and reverently: a beating heart is a breaking heart.

Second, we won’t protect you from a breaking heart. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. None of us are immune, and what’s more, we aren’t sure we want to be. Knowing our hearts could break has stopped only a few from experiencing love, and they’ve proved to be as dull as the curves of a hard-boiled egg.

What we can do is offer our stories of breaking to you in the hopes that they’ll help you with your own. And so, as the current President of the Society, it is my duty and privilege to give you one of my stories (I have a lot):

I was almost 17, and he was like a surprise recess a teacher gave to the class—not because we’ve been good, or got all our work done, but because she loved us. He and I sat on my front steps on summer evenings and spat watermelon seeds, holding the rinds shaped like U’s and the juice from the fruit traced the veins down our arms. We would body surf the waves of Lake Michigan, the water pushing our bodies along the sand and trying to get us as close to the Chicago skyline as it could.  All we ever fought over was who knew the most song lyrics (me). Our first kiss was on the beach, and the sand was warm, and the wind from the waves was watery and soft, and the cars on Lake Shore Drive hushed a love song driving to the ball game, driving to friends’, driving home.

Ours was a late summer to autumn romance, but by the time the ground hardened, and the wind off the lake cut through our letterman jackets like a blade, he’d grown tired of our definition. “The hunt is over,” is what he told me. I’d become monotonous is another word he’d used.

But this is not a tale of love lost. It is one of love found. You know when you’re learning something like how to ride a bike, and maybe you fall and slice your knee open? That wound feels the air like no other part of your body because it’s feeling it for the first time. 

Yes, this first crack stings. It knocked me down, but what happened was love had been unlocked, and I was marked from its unleashing.

The night I learned I was monotonous, my friends took me dancing. We danced all over our town—at every red light, in the parking lot while we waited for fries and Cokes, on friends’ front lawns. Just as I can still remember what it feels like to be called boring and colorless, I also remember thinking that the stop lights twinkled and glittered red into the black, the salt from the fries and the fizz from the Coke popped, the beat from the music pulsed, and I felt all of it and knew the new way I would move through the world was with a breaking, beating heart.

It is a painful and joyful power, this way of living. I felt it pulling on jeans, still warm from the dryer, and I felt it dipping candy canes into a tub of Cool Whip late at night, sitting cross-legged facing my best friend and talking about everything and nothing. I felt it in Algebra after what felt like hours of fighting and pleading with numbers and the letters X and Y, and I could feel the tears pooling, and I could hear my pencil against the desk, the thin sheet of loose leaf paper between them, and I was sure I would never understand, but I loved the sound my pencil made, and so I kept making noise.

I felt it reading Anne Frank’s diary in American Studies class, next to my friend Lisa, who I’d known since we were 4 years old. We’d just come in from lunch, where we’d been sitting in her car plucking our eyebrows because that’s where the light was best: “I believe that it’s spring within me, I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally, I feel utterly confused, I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I am longing….!” I would underline those words in green ink and draw a heart in the margin, then ever so subtly pull the note I was writing from underneath the book and try to finish it. I looked to Lisa, who was also writing a note, and who also had her finger on Anne’s words about spring and longing. 

I felt it when I danced—not so much because I was good, but because I understood beauty exists in pain and doubt and mistakes. It is the choice to keep dancing that sets that beauty loose.

There is a story in the Bible, where Jesus cures a deaf man. Into this man’s ear Jesus says, “ephphatha,” and it means, “be opened.” The man can then hear, a miracle no doubt, and one I believe, but it’s what happens before this that gets at the importance of the word Jesus uses. Just before he says, “ephphatha,” Jesus sighs. It is his wordless sound that suggests the heft that once this man will hear, he must be opened to the cries of the world. The cure —the healing—then, is in the breaking. 

To be opened requires some kind of breaking. 
To be opened might be the greater, the more excruciating miracle of all. 
And so it is with this command I send you:
Be opened to what you hear and see in the world. Be opened to the world’s touch, and be opened to the many ways you can and will touch the world. Be opened to all you’ll learn and all you’ll become.

May your hearts always beat to the pulse of this breaking world, believing its beauty pours from the fragments, the cracks, and the slices that we all make because we are full of spring and of longing, and we don’t know what else to do but set it free.