She kept her heart in a glass jar, high atop a shelf that loomed threateningly overhead. It was one of those jars – a grandmother's old jar – to be looked at and admired, but never to grab with your sticky, icky, little fingers. It sat on the corner, teetering this way then that, mocking her with threats of doom and destruction. The suspense ate at her day in and day out.
It was too tall and too risky for her to grab at, to keep it safely curled into her chest, away from danger. And at any moment it would seem as if the intimidating structure could topple down, taking her bleeding heart with it.
She wondered if it would make a difference to the fragile object inside.
Long black hair rolled down her back, curling around her shoulders and waist. Framing a pale face that had become too thin and too hollow to be pretty. Wisps covered bright blue eyes that had long since stopped seeing the beautiful scenery.
Was it about the journey, or was the journey just the methods upon which they used to torture you with? Were good memories truly good, or just future instruments in your painful demise?
She wondered if she wanted anymore memories.
Silently she stood up, slowly, to drag out a physical pain that briefly obliterated the much more intense impalpable one that rested with her glass-covered heart. It was over much too quick, and she wondered if she was going to become addicted to this pain, letting the wounds take a little long, a little longer. Don't heal, she prayed. Don't leave me too.
Maybe she would let herself rot away with them. The wounds would infect and spread, what couldn't take her down before would be beaten by sheer carelessness. A plague, a curse, a self-inflected method of bliss.
But they had trapped her in a promise she was too tired to keep, and too obligated to dare break. Black hair coiled around her neck, chains manifesting and holding her. She could not become addicted to pain, because she was too repulsed by the color red.
But still she wondered.
She walked out the door, clothed in checkers and flannel, and let the cold embrace her. Just for a little bit. Just a little release. She was still living.
She had promised.
They kept their hearts in plastic jars, beautifully decorated, but individual; unique. Safe on a miniature and sturdy shelf, upon which they could reach and draw their little container close. And then they could force open their cage and truly discover themselves. To look, to discover. To close for another day – because it was plastic like Tupperware, and used constantly.
They could stand a little battering. A little fall. It would sound loud at the moment, and a flurry of panic would ensue, but they would soon learn that it was never that serious. They would realize that while it may sound threatening and scary and utterly apocalyptic now, it wouldn't be irrevocable. But they would flutter all the same.
They never wondered about the potential damage in just letting it rest. They just instinctively knew they could take it, and dove right back in.
But she did. She knew. If hers was to fall, she wouldn't recover. You can be careless with plastic but you had to tip-toe around glass. And while their hearts, hardy and thriving, could survive out of the Tupperware, her dried up, bleeding heart had to stay safe up on her shelf at all times.
She knew this.
But how was she to keep her promise when the basic fundamentals of humanity were lost on her? How was she to live with these shackles if no one told her how long they reached?
A comb drifted through her long, black hair. It still curled around her, a tangled web of chains. But the comb persisted.
"Why don't you get it cut?" a soft voice asked. Tip toe, tip toe, around glass.
"Why would I?" her own voice questioned.
The comb continued to pull through tangled knot after knot, even as the silence grew thicker and thicker.
She left with the rising sun. One that cast shadows down the street, that let her see several different perspectives of herself on cold pavement, each one tall, proud. Her shoulders curve inwards. She was nothing but shrunken and ashamed. A useless figurine that should know its place, high atop a looming shelf.
She walked on.
She met him on a cold November day, and immediately brushed him off as way too cliché. She wasn't the damsel in distress, and even if she was there was no way she could afford to give the prince a kiss and live happily ever after.
His hair was red, bright against a pure white shirt. He smiled at her kindly – if not a little distracted. She let her pale, pale eyes avoid his, and slouched past. In this she made her mistake.
His head craned gently to the side, as if questioning her, but she did not pay attention to this. All she could see was the red, stark red, and she ran.
As well as one could, she supposed, with daggers in their sides and a hand gripping tightly the spot where her fragile heart should rest.
And he continued to look, to gaze, and to wonder. His attention, curiosity, peaked.
But she ran on.
Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Smiling, crying, laughing, hating. You knew it, they knew it, and while it made you shudder, they embraced it. They abolished all shelving units, looming or not, destroyed all containers that blocked their hearts. They didn't need to discover themselves, because they knew themselves all along. They never feared breaking their hearts because they never even considered the possibility.
And people loved their honesty, their openness, and at the same time envied it, despised it. That they could accept everyone, no ones, all things, small things, absolute things, undefined things, everything that came their way.
She wondered if this was the proper way to go about it.
He smiled at her over his cup, long nimble finger wrapped around the scalding cardboard. His smile was full of mystery, hidden secrets that she didn't care to uncover.
"Why don't you ever talk to them?" he asks, the knowing look a permanent design etched across flawless skin.
And she lets her dried up mouth reply: "Because they never talk to me."
He unwinds one hand from his dollar-forty-nine cup, and lays it over hers. "They try to talk to you all day long." He chuckles, a manly, throaty sound, foreign to her as of late.
He's grinning and it makes her frown. Pretty pink lips, too pale to be compared to anything but themselves, purse together. "No. They talk at me."
But he laughs, his hand still on hers, warming it up much faster then any ten-minute coffee could.
He's taken to walking her to her classes. Their classes, she should say, even though the fact that he switched out of one of hit antique artefacts classes into her ancient history one doesn't make the similarities coincidental.
He's smiling at her as they swap nicknames, whispering in her ear.
"Kurama." He says
And she says in reply: "Wench."
And his eyebrows draw up, always the perfect image, wondering. It clears into his persistent benign expression that's been aggravating her as of late.
"Beautiful." He corrects her.
And a thump-thump is rattling her glass encased heart.
Some people don't own hearts. They don't bother with shelves and cases because they have nothing to place there. They have not lost their heart or hidden it. Willingly, happily, they have given it away. Trusted it implacably with someone else. Sometimes, they get hearts in returns.
More often then not, they are given back their hearts, in pieces.
And she wonders if it's worth it.
"Will you tell me your story?" he asks.
She's whispering in his ear, her hands brittle and breaking but still searching. "I have no story" she confides.
He's holding her against him, folding himself overtop of her, a warm protection. He leans down to tickle her ear and she cannot see his approach.
She does not laugh, or worm away. She turns to draw a hand across his cheek. He looks at her with no expression, just patience in his eyes that glow emerald in the moonlight. "Everyone has a story." He says.
And she's holding herself to him now, trying to follow through with her promise. But one look at that ruby-red hair and emerald green eyes and his face full of clichés and she repeats: "I have no story."
And he smiles, waiting. "Maybe yours just isn't over yet."
And she's quiet as she considers this new possibility.
She looks into a mirror, the first time in months, and is startled by the changes. Startled that she can feel the changes. Her pale, sunken face has bloomed into a healthy roundness, from weeks of dollar-forty-nine coffees and his five-dollar buffet breakfast that always makes its way into her stomach. Her color has been brightened by midnight rendezvous' and long walks after classes are over, debating the reason for the French Revolution.
A smaller, older version of her approaches from behind and she turns. The woman smiles.
"You look better."
And she smiles as well, her pretty pink lips like rose buds, and all those clichés, drawn in a small upward curve.
"I know."
And together they grin at each other, the silence a warm blanket that pushes them together. And when her mother asks if she could cut her hair, the daughter agrees.
They all had hearts. On their sleeves, in their jars, in their chest. Treat them how they want, do with them what they will, keep them wherever – did any of it matter? They were all hearts, and each one want to love, to live, to thrive. The lucky ones managed to do just that.
She wondered about the unlucky ones. The ones like her. What became of them?
"I was told to live." She murmurs against his arm. He's telling her about the trees and the plants and she's leaning against him, telling him it doesn't matter, they're all beautiful.
"Do you need to be told to live?" He asks, eternally curious. His large hand his around her waist and she's buried in his warm embrace. Together they lean against a large oak tree that too is teeming with life.
She wants to smile at the picturesque couple they seem, and the abstract people they actually are.
Instead: "They tell me to live, demand me to love, and then leave me with no other choice but to follow."
She can feel his questions, but stays silent for a moment. Then:
"If I don't have a heart to give you, will you still stay with me?"
And he turns her head with his fingertips, gentle pads, and says furtively. "Always."
They're baking chocolate chip cookies, and he tells her she's sweeter then chocolate. She tells him she's more like the pre-manufactured stuff. Bitter.
He flings a spoonful of flour at her, and tells her that bitter people are angry. She turns to him and says that maybe she is angry, and is just hiding it well. He kindly informs her that she isn't angry, just confused and lost, and when she asks him to be her lighthouse, he agrees with a smile.
As he's licking the dough of her fingertips, he asks "Will you tell me why you have no heart?"
And she replies "If I do, will you look for it?"
"If I do will you run?"
And she smiles, a little unsure. "I'm too confused to run, right?"
"Then you can run towards me."
And she tells him why she has no heart.
She kept her heart in a glass jar, high atop a shelf that loomed threateningly overhead. There was no way to grab the jar – spider cracked glass and bitterly encased – without letting it fall and shatter into thousands of pieces. And so it remained up top, teetering precariously, reminding her that any moment it could drop and destroy the fragile world she's created.
She wasn't a tall woman, but maybe, just maybe, with a little support, someone taller and stronger could come along, and steal her heart right from under her nose.
And he'd show her that it wasn't encased in ice or bitterness, but it was just the old glass container, spider cracked and dusty, that led her to believe that. And that underneath it all there was a red, beating heart that doesn't make her want to avert her gaze any longer.
And he'd take it out, holding it oh-so-carefully, and she'd tell him it was all his. And he'd smile and thank her and tell her that it wasn't that she had no heart, it was that she hadn't known where to look for it. And she would say that she knew that, even though she hadn't. She had just let him find it.
She would follow their wishes and she would live. She would love.
She didn't wonder if it was risky this way. She didn't wonder if she'd be happier, safer, if she left it resting up on the looming shelf. She just did.
"Will you tell me your story?" She asks.
He smiles that benign smile that makes her smile in response as of late. "How about you become my story?"
And she grasps his hand with her own, light, lively, unsure but willing to go forward, and says:
"Only if you're mine."
Thump. Thump. Thump.