And I remain...

unbroken. It has been well established that words and I have a sort of tenuous understanding with each other: I use them to attempt to make meaning and they do their best to convey it—though my meanings are generally all over the place and theirs are as well. They are my favorite bother. But when a specific word begins to haunt me, I have to ask myself, “Why?”

A specific work that has plagued me for quite some time now is a simple one: unbroken. I’ve found it crop up in song lyrics, poems and short stories that I have written. “Unbroken, he lay on his bed in a heap.”
“Don’t you worry about me,
my heart remains unbroken.”
“Time’s unbroken tail swings gently
in the wind while makeshift
ladders are built to touch the
sky”

Sublime: painful beauty: two seemingly contradictory ideas. Unbroken has much of the same duality in that I see it as a celebration of proximity to brokenness without actually submitting. Essentially, the idea is that being unbroken is a good thing: the vase in her boudoir remains unbroken. Hooray! But it lives in the perilous state of being so delicate it could become broken at any time. Perhaps it is best described as being a fearful celebration.

Perhaps an example:

I have to go to work tonight. This is nothing unusual. Almost everybody has to go to work. Something slightly unusual about my particular situation is that I work overnight. It’s not incredibly unusual, but I feel pretty comfortable far fewer people work between 9pm and 6am than between 6am and 9pm. Further complications to my situation: this will be my ninth straight day of being at my place of employment. To be fair, there are those who work constantly, but once again I feel like somewhere between 5 and 6 days of work in a row is “the norm.” Another complication: the life of an overnight manager is a difficult one on regular human sleep patterns (read: 16 hours of sleep in the last 120 hours of wakefulness). Fairness must once again intercede and I must admit that I normally get around four hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, but this last run has been especially hectic and afforded me even less opportunity for repose and I choose to use it as my best example. Finally, my shifts are often 12 hours or longer of physical, manual labor.

I’m tired, I’m sore, my head hurts most of the time, and I’m losing weight because I don’t usually have time to eat—the worst possible reason for losing weight is one where it’s not because you don’t want to eat, but because you can’t eat.

And yet, through the worst of it, I come home, pour myself a stiff drink of bottom shelf vodka (the one that’s between 6 and 8 dollars…you know the one I mean…), sink into the creases of my couch, and strum the guitar and wail away like a coyote until the neighbors and my roommates hate me. I wail away because I sit there an unbroken man: celebrating my teetering position on the precipice—if only because I haven’t fallen in yet.