Seeing Hearts

When we lived in the city, my mother saw hearts in her cereal. She saw them in her beer suds, her sourdough. I saw someone being pushed into oncoming traffic in a wheelchair. I was flipped off on the drive to work by a skateboarder swerving at my grill. I told her I was scared because it looked like he was not, like he didn’t care if he died. Maybe something happened at home, she said, by which I think she meant maybe his home was empty. Maybe many homes were, & that was what the helicopters searched for, or the man we caught rifling through our glove box filled with CDs of 30-year-old love songs. It was after the divorce when the hearts began to appear. A dropped glob of mayonnaise. A potato chip with a hole. Each one a coincidence, but together? My mother says she believes they were messages that urged Keep going. The world is bigger than grief. At last, we were robbed in the heart of the city, outside the Circle K, by a man who appeared to be homeless. Why did we want so badly to live there? We spoke of its mysterious energy, the eavesdropping at cafes, the strangers you meet & briefly fall in love with, the Bikram yoga & midday glasses of wine, & the feeling one gets when tipsy that every city light holds a dream not dissimilar from yours: the hope of getting lost in all that hugeness, where anything could happen to get better, or infinitely worse, & it never happens only to you.