It takes a lifetime to change a metropolis into a village.

A man’s heart is like a metropolis. There are many buildings and streets; some streets are dead-ended. Some buildings are bizarre and nebulous as if started on a whim with no intent to inhabit or take any building form.

Those dead-end streets are dark and end up facing a single wall of anger, rage, hatred, cold indifference, pavement checking, inability to forgive, or any circular behavior that doesn’t offer any resolution. There is one fading streetlight at the wall to exacerbate the futility of the place, the utter hopelessness of ending up there.

Within the tall and inhabitable buildings are many floors with many rooms and some of the rooms remain closed, some rooms are opened, but the closets may remain closed, and those heart closets are waiting for a singular female hand. Each building has a particular emotional and psychic décor, and passages are arranged in many different ways according to the plan of the heart.

Floor after floor contain some closed rooms, experiential places that may be too painful to open or forgotten joys that are so sequestered in inaccessible side halls that they never see a hand on a doorknob or the light from another opened room. Those experiences float like phantasms, poorly defined but nothing that can be touched or come into clear focus.

There are new constructions depending on the man; there may be deconstruction or no construction or movement at all. He may take on adventure of the heart or keep his heart closed to new experience, and nothing but an empty space is there, a lot for sale for nothing, no money down, and it’s really nothing. If you buy, it is a wafer of a surface and no depth. There is no ground underneath and you can only stand there. If you dig beneath the surface, you will fall through a forever hole. The real estate agent for this lot is the man himself, and depending on his heart, he will be a hard or soft sell, and a buyer may never arrive, and if she does, she doesn’t build; she can’t as fraud has been experienced. It lasted one night and an “I’ll call you.”

Across a park of transparencies, on a lot that springtime forgot, a foundation has been laid and stopped halfway. Fixed in a season of nothing that spring forsakes, only this place and maybe another, but season is dictated by the very experience. There is nothing of earthly seasons here but a psychic ambience that may shift instantly. Taking the construction to the end, it was a building that fell. There may be a floor completed after the foundation with the skeleton of a next floor, and that’s all it will ever get, or it might have a future continuance if the heart imagines something that doesn’t exist and the result would be eventual disappearance. A woman comes and goes and leaves a skeletal structure and no more. It is she who dictates the constructions of the city to the man’s heart, but also a heart can create its own reality, but it does not last forever this phantasmagoric wish that may be very deeply imbedded in desire.

Year after year, floor after floor, nail after nail, sheetrock and paint of one particular color or another, bare walls, or walls hung with pictures of people and places is these buildings’ progress. In one room there is a table without anything on it, the promise of a memento, but in all rooms there is always one closet with the same heart in some fashion; it is the same, but a single expression of it may be revealed only here, and the décor sometimes gives no clue of the expression.

Streets are paved and half paved. Signs placed to stop, caution, or welcome, certain small one floored buildings that are clean and radiant for the simplest of relationships, or holes in the ground, spaces so dark and so cold as to radiate their airs beyond and warp the stop signs keeping them wavy and nebulous except for the sense of the red color and the word. These places the man does not know of until he is traumatized. It can become like a black hole in space that draws all matter into it. Nothing can possibly exist in this magnetism, and it gets ripped apart into raw elemental confusion because we are talking about human feelings, and to be confused is to not learn a thing.

Through a door a woman may enter a room on some floor. It may be on a high floor as she had taken her time getting to know this building. There are hallways with open and closed doors. In open rooms, she may walk in and wander around on the carpet; a carpet made of the fabric of the road this man has taken. She can take her shoes off and rub her toes into the fabric and feel some of the man’s journey. On the walls of this room will hang the people, places, and obsessions this man has. His wants and desires are on the tables as half formed terra cotta figurines so if he gets what he wants the figurines are complete. The curtains are drawn tight, or some light is peeking through, or even the curtain is open wide and daylight shines through the room depending on the man. She may walk to a heart closet and be brave enough to open it and find a heart beating in there, a heart of fire or ice. A warm heart, a cold heart, but a heart nevertheless, and through this part of the organ, the whole may be accepted or rejected. In other closets are memories that remain tacit until opened, and this is part of a life’s history. A closeted life some of them contain, and the fear of just being. Closets within closets like little wooden Russian figurines, they are the same but smaller and smaller or larger and larger depending on who is at the heart of the analogy. She may also walk into the dark hallway of narcissism and see The Three Doors--Me, Myself and I. These doors remain closed and only for the most powerfully committed woman to struggle and open. The hallway offers some rest for her, and it seems to be a comforting hallway that has temporary shelter.

A man’s heart can have traffic jams of unspent emotions. Lane after lane, car after car, either moving or stalled and creeping along at a rate unnoticeable by most. Those who notice the movement may actually see over towards the horizon a final destination and long for that place, as it seems like paradise. The traffic, as a vein of blood, is sameness to an emotion. Slow and clogged like the vein of a sick man waiting to die from lack of blood flow, the traffic jam of apathy moving ever so slowly, inch by inch towards a cliff of self-destruction.

The air of this metropolis may be polluted, and clarity of place may be obscure as this metropolis may be located nowhere and wandering to take root in the soil of an identity. The dust of construction and the cars can obscure the mountains in the distance or the desert beyond the city, the forest, the fields, and the land structures that give a place the character of location and identify something of a personality. This place is someone strong or weak, but who is this person, and what is the nature of his being? The buildings rise high into this fog, pollution, this billowing vapor of a monster’s lungs, and the uppermost floors are not to be seen in this metropolis. A high flying woman in an aircraft of aspiration to love the city, to give herself to a dark and barely known place may crash into these high floors and may fall into the arms of a warm lover, someone else, a momentary physician to repair the wounds.

She can open a door and reveal a wonder of jeweled light, of clean spaces with warmth and comfort only to open another door that contains the foul odor of a beast that lurks half seen and hungry to devour the heart of a woman, and she may close that door in time and rescue this man’s heart from it or step away from the building and the metropolis entirely to leave it for the next victim or savior that may cause the beast to become a dove and fly away into a sky that has cleared to reveal a landscape that was never before known to anyone.

We are not meant to be alone, and a city may be deconstructed to leave a village with one walkway leading to an open space where life is clean and fresh, and the hand of a woman can take the man’s hand and lead him off towards her village.

But timing is everything in relationships, dictated like a slot machine in Las Vegas, and a woman may set a bomb to blow the whole city apart and leave a smoldering place that may further implode. The space may be a cold hole forever, not releasing a molecule of emotion or a negative release of high density.

Some men are bred for dynamism and action. Some men reading this say this is not I. The forgotten talents or never before realized dispositions of the personality haunt the average American man, and he may die a stranger to himself.

Next: The Conquistadors