Paper Hearts
It is a slow process: the destruction and eventual discard of one's heart. You start with the edges and slowly chisel and burn your way inward, toward the center, taking great pains in the careful cauterization of each progressive wound. For some people, the process can take months or years; for some people it never happens at all. Some hearts don't bleed, and some people never check.
* * * * *
He sat staring expectantly at the passage he had just written. He wanted it to say so much more, wanted its meaning to speak to him in some way. Surely after everything there must be something more, but this was all he could muster--a simple truth it seemed he'd known for ages. He was more struck with the banality and insignificance of the end than with the end itself. Was it all nothing then? Had the past several months been a forfeit to slow time and waste? Was there no possibility of transcendence in this bitter parting? He needed some sort of validation, a sense of value or worth to attach to the time they'd spent together. But all it amounted to was the simple, unheeding passage of time. He took a long drag on his cigarette and thought back to the beginning.
* * * * *
It started with an outstretched hand. Was it his hand or hers? He
reminded himself that it was she who had sought him out. She had been so certain, so
determined. Surely it was her lonely hand reaching for his. He didn't need anyone, was
determined not to need anyone. Love shouldn't be a matter of need, he thought; she'd never
seemed to understand that like he had. How else could she have been so certain? Of course,
he hadn't refused her hand either...
At first he had kept her safely outside the walls he'd patiently built
around himself. Inside these walls, his whole life had been a single interminable reach.
History had often reached out with a striking hand, however, and only behind these walls
was he safe from its crushing blows. It wasn't that he'd grown callous or mistrusting; he
was simply afraid. What if he grabbed the wrong hand and missed his chance for the right
one? He wasn't comfortable making a choice he was only sixty or seventy percent sure
of--he needed one hundred percent assurance behind every footfall, or he wouldn't move at
all. He read the strategy guide before he played the video game and the review before he
saw the movie. And so he'd spent his life walking in place, reaching out to no one at all,
enclosed within the walls he'd constructed with bricks of doubt.
But somehow she'd broken through this fortification, gradually clawing
her way in, brick by brick. In his loneliness and frustration, he too pounded against
these walls. You see, he had an extraordinary capacity for love--enough love, in fact, to
envelope the entire human race in its comforting blanket of warmth. But the human race was
vastly incapable of receiving such love. They had grown cold and unreceptive--had become a
nation of eremites, drunk on self-satisfaction and contentment. The outstretched hand of
his youth was met with the staggering indifference of hands clasped behind backs and hands
locked tight around others' necks. These were the hands he had sought to escape, the hands
that had thrust him into isolation. And these were the hands with which she pounded
against his cold exterior.
He sought only one person--one single person in the entire human
race--who could bear the unrelenting assault of his love. The tepid waters of this love
encompassed him wholly, comforted him with the steady rise and fall of its tides. But
behind his walls, he was drowning in this ocean, its promise of fulfillment receding into
asphyxiating waves of emptiness. Unrealized love for him had become a poison; he was
dying, slowly collapsing under the weight of unfulfillment resting painfully on his
shoulders.
It was her insistent chiseling that eventually brought release for this pain--a minute
crack in the base of his impenetrable fortress. Through this tiny crack, the ocean of his
love flowed, gently at first, and then all at once, in an unstoppable torrent. This
outpouring took the form of a single paper heart.
* * * * *
The first day back in the factory after Christmas was a long one. He
awoke to complete darkness and clambered sleepily out of bed. He poured his usual thermos
of coffee--his morning attempt to recognize the faces of his co-workers and
work-station--and poured another, less usual, thermos of vodka--his afternoon attempt to
forget these things--and set off for work under a starry sky.
He searched the daily schedule for his name and found, to his delight,
that he would be working alone. He shuffled silently to his appointed work station, poured
a large cup of coffee, and began to gather the materials for the day's insomnambulistic
routine. As the morning drifted on and his mind grew more alert, her face became etched in
his thoughts. They'd spent Christmas together. He hated holidays but, nonetheless, had
been inspired--he thought by his feelings for her--to make her a gift. It wasn't much,
really, but she had taken it to be a profession of his love. He hadn't meant it as such,
but it felt so wonderful to finally have some release for the passion he'd kept pent up
for so long, that he played along.
His thoughts, that very long day, focused solely on the innumerable
ways he could express his passion to her. Caught up in the flood of this passion, he
returned from work in a state of fervor and excitement that he hadn't known since he was a
boy. His plan was simple: in a single paper heart he would express to her the full expanse
of his love. He labored for hours over the red construction paper, perfecting every curve
and contour of the heart. On one side of the heart he wrote:
YOU'VE CAPTURED MY HEART
On the other side of the heart he wrote:
Love is waking up in the arms of a stranger
and going to sleep in the embrace of your best friend.
Well-versed in the ways of caution and doubt, however, he hesitated. For the first time, he considered that she may have been only a vessel for his love and not the destination. He reached for the scissors and cut a small piece out of what would have been the left aorta had the heart been a real one. It was this piece that he mailed to her.
* * * * *
In their month apart they had fallen in love with each other's
shadows--dark and blurry loosely-defined depictions of their identities cast in the
moment. In their minds these images had remained static, while in actuality their movement
was continuous. Perhaps it would have been better if they had never actually seen each
other again.
Over the course of the next two months they became acutely aware of the
growing disparity between shadow and substance. She became to him much like a paper mache
cast of the shadow she had once cast in his mind. She thought by wearing the mask of a
static image she could keep their love static as well; it would be perpetuated in its
unchangingness. He engaged in no such pretense. He had to keep moving, like the flow of
his love. In this way, the ocean of his love passed by her inert form altogether, grossly
overshooting its mark. Its waves, finding no shore to roll upon, gradually lost momentum
and faded out. And so too their relationship gradually faded. There were no fireworks, no
explosions, and no assurances. It was a simple, sordid, bitter end.
The small piece of his heart had served not as a symbol of all the love
he could express to her, but of the tiny amount she was capable of receiving, a grim
reminder of what she would never have. He didn't blame her; she had locked hands with a
shadow, indulged in the comfort of its simplicity. For most people, this was enough--the
pretense of affection. But what comfort was it really, to hold a shadow? For its lack of
substance, one would find oneself locked not in the shadow's embrace but one's own. And so
she stood, with her arms locked about herself, incapable of giving or receiving anything.
Her own embracing arms now shackled her.
He had hoped to find liberation beyond the walls, release for his
unrealized emotion. What he had found was nothing. Within the walls he had known
suffering, the withering pain of his unrealized potential to love. At least then there was
potential. Now his arms hung limply at his sides for lack of anything to reach for. His
hands were unbound and empty.
* * * * *
He stepped outside into the cool spring afternoon. He gazed up at
the scattered clouds, thinking about the task at hand. It was partly sunny and a bit
windy--a perfectly average day. How appropriate, he thought to himself, that endings
always fall on such complacent days. He strolled casually and slowly to the old rickety
bridge over the lagoon. There was a strange serenity in the air which slowly crept into
his mind. This will be painless and easy, he thought. He seated himself before a missing
plank in the bridge and peered into the squalid water below. He saw his reflection
quivering in its surface. The water's random disturbances looked like tears on the
distorted face. He hadn't cried in a very long time.
He reached deep into his pocket and withdrew the remains of the paper
heart. He read its two messages--YOU'VE CAPTURED MY HEART and Love is waking
up in the arms of a stranger and going to sleep in the embrace of your best friend--several
times over before fumbling in his pocket for a lighter. He ignited the lighter and stared
for a moment at its dancing flame. He exhaled slowly and cautiously moved the flame to the
tip of the heart. The wind picked up, extinguishing the flame several times. He held it to
now to the various edges, as the heart slowly became enveloped in the crescendoing flame.
He stared fixedly at the burning remains of his hope and love and then released the heart,
watching it spiral through the space in the bridge into the murky waters.
The only words he could see as the remainder of the paper heart floated
to the surface were CAPTURE MY HEART, an eerie message imploring someone, anyone,
to reach into the frigid waters and retrieve the charred remains--to give him one more
chance to smile. It was a plea for something to fight for, a reason to keep reaching, a
reason to move. He rose sluggishly and began walking. And he kept walking. He had
woken up in the arms of a stranger, but he wouldn't be sleeping that night.
