I lost my heart yesterday.
Left, accidentally I think, on the last bus heading out of town and to the horizon. I thought the bus was empty, but then at the back I saw a time traveller, lost halfway to yesterday. She was crying, and her tears were like tiny universes caressing her cheeks, glittering and leaving only trails of stardust where her sorrow used to be. I wanted to catch one of those tears in a vial, so whenever I was alone I could hold it to the light, or cup it to my chest where my heart was and feel it shine. I could drink it, and replace my missing organ with a galaxy of supernovas.
But I didn’t catch a tear, and I left my heart on the last bus heading to the horizon.
I think that girl must have lost a lover. A time traveller, so her other half could have been Time itself, with his hourglass and his notepad, counting down the days to day’s end. It takes a broken heart to cry like that, not just a misplaced one. But it takes time to heal a heart, so I don’t know where that leaves her. Perpetually broken, a tribute to all things left behind.
Today, I went to the bus stop with missing posters of my missing heart. Photocopied hearts and I stuck them with glue and oily fingerprints to every spot that would hold them. I handed them out to the lost and the desperate, and those people that tend to find themselves at bus stops where all the buses leave and don’t come back. I think I found the driver of the bus I was on, but I wasn’t sure because every time he spoke his faced changed, like every word he said made him a different person. With my stack of photocopied hearts I painted that bus stop contrast black ink on white, and when the sun went down and the wind picked up, the steady whistling made the bus stop feel a heart. The passengers, looking around in a kind of wonder, considered their surroundings, a heart inside a heart, and me with my stack of paper, and a hole in my chest where my heart used to be.
When dawn came, I had no more paper in my stack, but all the passengers heading into the horizon had a glimpse of my photocopied heart and a whispered promise to hold eyes open and keep the heart safe for me, should it be found.
I sat on a bench, and had to keep digging my fingers into the wood grain to keep from floating away. I was too light now. I didn’t know that hearts were like anchors, but I suppose it makes sense. I thought again about the time traveller with the great unknown contained inside her tears. I wondered if she saw me somewhere between her idea of yesterday. I wondered if she found my heart.
“Yes,” she said, “I did.”
And there she was, standing next to me, her cheeks still glittering with stardust and the cracks in her face cleaved by a lover lost. In her hand she held my heart, bloody and pumping, red and once lost, sluggishly inviting me to hold it. I took it off her. It felt cold, and on the surface I could see where her tears had struck it, and painted space on the muscles that kept my blood pumping. It fit just like the last piece in a puzzle, and felt like it too, perfect and accomplished. The hole in my heart closed over, and then the skin stretched back into place, leaving only a tiny ruby on the surface to show where it had once been opened. My feet held tight to the ground, and my brain didn’t worry anymore, and my photocopied hearts went out into the world anyway and kept the beat going.
And the girl disappeared as soon as I looked up to thank her, but I suppose time travellers do that.
0 comments:
Post a Comment