We Were Once Grayish-Pink

He had the world fooled. He walked in the room with a head close to the ceiling and a smile that made her think of the innocence of stupidity. He looked. He stared. He looked so hard he thought he could see her soul. All it took was a yes from her unyielding lips.

The world had looked down on her with indifference. It threw stones until she could see more red than pale flesh. She looked over and saw the man who claimed to see her soul. Her lips said yes to him. They continued to say yes and yes until he provoked an “I love you” from the lips so used to saying no.

He had her. He carried her heart around with pride at first. During this time, she shared with him her innocence as they laughed and held hands under the palm tree lights. The pride vanished sooner than the stories had warned. What he did thereafter was carry her heart loosely in his backpack. Eventually, he forgot it was there while she walked around campus with a hollow chest. A hollow chest and yielding lips. The world still saw him as kind with the innocent smile of stupidity still painted on his face. All she saw was the man who had lost her heart somewhere between his dorm and Business Statistics without the care enough to go looking for it.

She kept his heart on the highest peak in her room and tended to it as if it was a baby bird in need of its mother. He comes back to claim what is his. After he leaves, she is left to find her heart somewhere between his dorm room and Business Statistics. Her yielding lips once again say “I love you.” His smile has vanished completely. He is unyielding. She is unworthy. He gets his heart back.

She misses taking care of his heart. She thought she was doing a good job. For all her hard work, she is alone.

On her heart, she writes:

You are missing from me. In every moment of every day, I continue to live inside precarious walls hiding from a disease no one knows anything about except the rapidity in which it kills. Even still, some moments feel like I am living well. But I am living incomplete. Where are your arms at the end of my day? Where are your warmth and your fluttering eyes when I wake up in my bed every morning? My eyes burn dry as they continue to scan for you.

I don’t love myself enough to know this is what is best for me because those little moments, the ones when you were awake and laughing in my ear and picking me up and throwing me on the bed, those are the ones that still take up most of my mind. And for that to be in my past is the greatest death of my heart.

When she finds her heart, it is pinkish gray. It used to be grayish pink. With every drop of water that escapes her eye and lands on her heart, she thinks it will soon be renewed. She has no idea all she is doing is adding a layer of plastic that keeps the scars intact yet hidden.

There had been a month of intense quarantining and reforming before he came back. He goes right to the heart and pets it as if it is a childhood friend that should feel elated to be near him again. With or without meaning to, he tears the plastic. The dark blood that had been waiting for reentry into the world seeps from the tare. Pleasure-pain fills the room. While standing in front of the closed door, she tells him to leave. His eyebrows move together an eighth of an inch. He tells her if she ever needs a friend to watch over her heart for any reason, he would be there in a moment. Excited to have begun their forced friendship, he leaves with a smile and a pumping chest.

She turns around to face her poor heart laying on the wooden tiles. The plastic is gone. It barely moves when she picks it up. She would have to start over.

More than anything she wants to give it back to him. More than anything she knows he doesn’t actually want it.

On her heart, she writes:

I know we can’t be together. I know we shouldn’t be together. I know we make each other unhappy. I know saying this won’t change any of that. But I miss you. I want to talk to you. I want to know what you’d say. I know everything about you, my love. My love, we used to see each other every day. And now our endeavor is to just get over each other. I’ve contemplated many times the notion of getting over someone as if they aren’t human, as if they are instead a fallen tree branch in the path of existence.

And I’m starting to think humans are not supposed to do that to each other.

I heard that you want someone else to be a place for your lips. I hate you.

As before, there are good days and bad days. She becomes her own experiment. She will find all of the different activities in life that will make pumping her heart feel more like a blessing and less like a chore. She tries mountain peaks and nice-sounding philosophies and long showers and Friday nights at the drive-in with a calculated and burly man. She even tries hallucinogens and takes a day trip into Jane Eyre. Despite this, she feels something missing. She is naive enough to think it is a simple apology she is after rather than a time machine to the “Era of Unforced Lightness.”

The statement of “I’m sorry” might be enough to make her heart forgive him for all the times it was shoved off of his desk to make room for his laptop and bong.

She walks right up to his door. He makes her wait outside for three days. Still, she is headstrong, capable, and above all, she is fine. When he lets her in, in a rushed and muddled voice, she asks for what she came there to get: an “I’m sorry.”

Why is she surprised when he looks coolly into her green eyes and says “This is your fault”? He isn’t sorry. He is the most dreaded word of all: thankful. He is thankful his life is better. Why would he be sorry for such a thing?

That night, laying in bed, the words “I’m sorry” still take up the entirety of her dreams. They aren’t from his lips. They are from her yielding lips. This is her fault. She is sorry. She hopes maybe one day he can have the grace to forgive her.

On her heart, she writes:

Before things got bad, you took pride in walking me home from work. Afterward, you sought only to excuse yourself from the matter entirely.

Before things got bad, I loved watching shows with you. Afterward, watching shows with your eyes closed was all that we did.

Before things got bad, you would buy me chocolate just to see me smile. Afterward, “It’s too expensive,” was all that you said when I suggested we get ice cream.

Before things got bad, I could make you laugh with daily observations. Afterward, I felt like I was trying to talk to you through a fish tank.

I know now that “Before things got bad…” really means, “When you were still in love with me…” I know now I wasn’t in love with the man in front of me, but with the Before You. I was in love with the man I knew you could be- the one who made every cell in my body sing, the one I wished desperately would one day come back. But you never did.

She hasn’t cried in 16 days. This is by far the longest she has gone since he first showed signs of restless evil during Christmastime. She understands that the lightness of her heart has nothing to do with whether the one she loved had forced an arrowhead into its center. The way that she deals with the pierced heart defines its lightness.

Fine, Abandoning One, you can keep your arrowhead wedged entirely in her heart. If she keeps her measured breathing and well-placed words, she can smile because of her - instead of in spite of you.

Her heart is once again grayish pink. The springing lightness of hope has added more color to the beating lifeline. The hope is that she herself is enough to reach the self-actualized joy again. She was once a summer dress in the midst of winter snow. What has been will once more come to pass. Her heart is now armed with new knowledge of the dredges of existence, and she steps back into herself.