to break a heart into more pieces than it's made of.
first posted to we_are_cities .
for december 14, 2008 || (about 900 words) || rated: g.
title twisted from a quote in jonathan safran foer's "extremely loud & incredibly close."
When she was born, the doctors gave her a brand new heart, one that had never been used or broken. Most babies, when they’re born, they get refurbished hearts - the hearts constructed from scrap muscle and recycled valves. Reliable and cheap. It was very rare that a new heart was installed, and when this did happen, the results were almost always extraordinary. In her case, this fresh heart came to serve as a bottomless tub in which to collect love.
When she was one, she fell in love with colors. This was the happiest year of her life. This was the year spent watching red and orange ladybugs crawl over the dark concrete, the months spent chasing yellow butterflies and falling on soft, green grass, the days spent soaking in chemical blue pool water in her bathing suit, the purple one with violet stars and stripes. This one afternoon, while she was still working out the mechanics of her legs and feet, she ran straight into a cherry tree. She hugged the sides of its trunk with her tiny arms and staggered back, came away with skin the color of wet tar, her shirt dripping black onto the turf. Everything she touched from then on dissolved into her clothes and hair, seeped through her skin like she’d been dipped in a tray of spinning watercolors. Some days, she hugged and kissed and touched so many hues that she glowed, hot and bright as a newborn star.
When she was two, she fell in love with music. What she loved were the individual sounds and the many ways they could be strung together. She fell for the cymbal hits, the tinkling of chimes, the low tremor that followed the pluck of a string. She had a radio in her room, set up on the windowsill near her bed, always tuned to a classical station so that the music flowed without interruption. No noise. Just sounds. Many times, she heard sounds so beautiful that she laughed for days in a crisp soprano. Sometimes, she heard a sound so particularly sad that she would not eat and could only sleep once she had exhausted herself crying. She lost her voice from grieving every so often, and her sobs became a low, guttural sound like the blow of a conch. Her father realized then that his daughter’s love was the destructive kind, the kind that tore a person apart from the inside, a conspiracy. Once he understood this, he saw that her heart was not much different from his own.
When she was three, she fell in love with words. When she first saw them, printed black and tiny on the pages of her father’s novels and papers and calendars, she mistook the words for colors. When she heard them, spoken from her own mouth and the mouths of everyone she came across, she mistook them for music. Yet, gradually, she came to see that words had a specific behavior, and that yes, they could paint pictures the way colors could, and yes, they could form rhythms more beautiful sometimes than the ones she heard at night on her little radio, but words - they were a whole other, separate thing. She loved them more intensely than she had loved nearly anything else so far, and she practiced them to herself, then to her father, then to anyone who would hear her. She began writing her speeches all over her arms and hands and legs. “Hello, I am three years old, I like to paint and draw and sing and laugh and exist, my favorite thing out of everything I know is my papa, even though he is not really a thing, just like I am not exactly a thing because I am a person, but if people could be things, I think, we would be some of the strangest things in the world, maybe. That is what I think.”
She was nearing her fourth birthday when - inexplicably and without warning - her heart failed. It stopped making love. Her father drove her to the hospital, where the doctors ran tests and scans and scribbled frenzied notes on their clipboards without touching her or uttering a word. “What’s going on?” her father asked. The nurses shied away from him. He asked a surgeon, “What’s happening?” and she could not meet his eyes. “Will anyone talk to me?” he asked. He felt incredibly alone. The surgeon sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said, “we’ll have to take out her heart.” “Why?” “She’s loved too much, too soon, too deeply. We need to take out the heart before it bursts.” “How will she love, then?” “She won’t. Not anymore.” “Will she love me?” “She won’t love anyone.” “But will she love me?” The surgeon’s eyes were mournful, round and blue. “No,” she said. “She will not love you.” She turned back to the operating table, where the girl lay unconscious, inky words and colors running off her cold body like condensation, a faint hum pulsing in her throat. The girl’s father brought his hands to his face and clawed at the skin, giving himself an excuse to scream. When that pain subsided, a twisting in his chest surged. He imagined his own heart being slit open, slowly, by an amateur.
*
for december 14, 2008 || (about 900 words) || rated: g.
title twisted from a quote in jonathan safran foer's "extremely loud & incredibly close."
When she was born, the doctors gave her a brand new heart, one that had never been used or broken. Most babies, when they’re born, they get refurbished hearts - the hearts constructed from scrap muscle and recycled valves. Reliable and cheap. It was very rare that a new heart was installed, and when this did happen, the results were almost always extraordinary. In her case, this fresh heart came to serve as a bottomless tub in which to collect love.
When she was one, she fell in love with colors. This was the happiest year of her life. This was the year spent watching red and orange ladybugs crawl over the dark concrete, the months spent chasing yellow butterflies and falling on soft, green grass, the days spent soaking in chemical blue pool water in her bathing suit, the purple one with violet stars and stripes. This one afternoon, while she was still working out the mechanics of her legs and feet, she ran straight into a cherry tree. She hugged the sides of its trunk with her tiny arms and staggered back, came away with skin the color of wet tar, her shirt dripping black onto the turf. Everything she touched from then on dissolved into her clothes and hair, seeped through her skin like she’d been dipped in a tray of spinning watercolors. Some days, she hugged and kissed and touched so many hues that she glowed, hot and bright as a newborn star.
When she was two, she fell in love with music. What she loved were the individual sounds and the many ways they could be strung together. She fell for the cymbal hits, the tinkling of chimes, the low tremor that followed the pluck of a string. She had a radio in her room, set up on the windowsill near her bed, always tuned to a classical station so that the music flowed without interruption. No noise. Just sounds. Many times, she heard sounds so beautiful that she laughed for days in a crisp soprano. Sometimes, she heard a sound so particularly sad that she would not eat and could only sleep once she had exhausted herself crying. She lost her voice from grieving every so often, and her sobs became a low, guttural sound like the blow of a conch. Her father realized then that his daughter’s love was the destructive kind, the kind that tore a person apart from the inside, a conspiracy. Once he understood this, he saw that her heart was not much different from his own.
When she was three, she fell in love with words. When she first saw them, printed black and tiny on the pages of her father’s novels and papers and calendars, she mistook the words for colors. When she heard them, spoken from her own mouth and the mouths of everyone she came across, she mistook them for music. Yet, gradually, she came to see that words had a specific behavior, and that yes, they could paint pictures the way colors could, and yes, they could form rhythms more beautiful sometimes than the ones she heard at night on her little radio, but words - they were a whole other, separate thing. She loved them more intensely than she had loved nearly anything else so far, and she practiced them to herself, then to her father, then to anyone who would hear her. She began writing her speeches all over her arms and hands and legs. “Hello, I am three years old, I like to paint and draw and sing and laugh and exist, my favorite thing out of everything I know is my papa, even though he is not really a thing, just like I am not exactly a thing because I am a person, but if people could be things, I think, we would be some of the strangest things in the world, maybe. That is what I think.”
She was nearing her fourth birthday when - inexplicably and without warning - her heart failed. It stopped making love. Her father drove her to the hospital, where the doctors ran tests and scans and scribbled frenzied notes on their clipboards without touching her or uttering a word. “What’s going on?” her father asked. The nurses shied away from him. He asked a surgeon, “What’s happening?” and she could not meet his eyes. “Will anyone talk to me?” he asked. He felt incredibly alone. The surgeon sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said, “we’ll have to take out her heart.” “Why?” “She’s loved too much, too soon, too deeply. We need to take out the heart before it bursts.” “How will she love, then?” “She won’t. Not anymore.” “Will she love me?” “She won’t love anyone.” “But will she love me?” The surgeon’s eyes were mournful, round and blue. “No,” she said. “She will not love you.” She turned back to the operating table, where the girl lay unconscious, inky words and colors running off her cold body like condensation, a faint hum pulsing in her throat. The girl’s father brought his hands to his face and clawed at the skin, giving himself an excuse to scream. When that pain subsided, a twisting in his chest surged. He imagined his own heart being slit open, slowly, by an amateur.
*