“The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She left her grayish green city once; she left for a town on the riverfront. When she returned she had so much luggage that she had to leave her heart behind. In order to make sure it wouldn’t get lost or accidentally dumped into the river, she entrusted it to a boy who had saved her life once, when she was about to choke in her own monotonous breath. Despite the girl’s constant clumsiness, the boy insisted in saving her over and over and over again. Too bad the boy had to take off too, to his own town of rice paddies and hot springs.
Home again, her suitcase turned into drawers, the girl placed her hand against her chest. She felt nothing. Her face turned pale for a brief moment, but rather than despairing, she immediately dashed to her front door, to wait. Her heart’s custody couldn’t have just run away and let her die… or could it? Who’d want a heart in these days?
Months passed, and her face had lost all possible color and her limbs began to shake. However, something was lying by her feet. The first package had arrived. Then a second, and then a third made their appearance. The girl was receiving envelopes with hundreds of thousands of heartbeats to go on, plus a lifelong promise. When the promise arrived in a big box, she began to feel a trace of another heartbeat mingled with hers. She didn’t need an explanation to understand.
“It will be impossible to get it back the way I knew it,” she pondered every night in her bed. “If he comes to me someday, to my grayish green city, he will bring me a bigger heart, but we’ll have to share it. I don’t mind, though.”
She smiled then, placing her hand over her chest to feel its silence, picturing life when she would turn left in her horizontal slumbers to find the slow ticking of a piece of soul she had lost so long ago.