Heartstrings

When our girl learns to read, she will trace each letter, each word with her fingertips
Almost as if she is trying to capture worlds, orbiting each sentence with her tiny young hands
Like small planets around a star.
And when she goes places, she will run her fingers over surfaces,
Collecting
As if by some miracle she will one day wake up to find the whole world contained in her hands.
And baby, I'll tell her, because I know she will listen
Baby, don't go forgetting what you love
Because when you do, you'll find the world
Slipping through those fingers
Like I did once.


I had a dream last night that you were here
Only, it wasn't your presence, but your absence which made you present.
Because I feel even your absences, in the place your heart should fill
In the negative space of me that should hold you perfectly
In the silences your words should replace,
In the stillness of my battering heart.
And when I dream that I wake up next to a man that I could no more love
Than one loves the people walking behind the news reporters on T.V
I awake to find it more and more true each day.
And I'm not going to tell you that my heart broke
Because I have forgotten what it was like
To have a heart so intact that it could
Fall to pieces at your distant touch.


And I'm not God, but I'm looking for him underneath each table and chair and rug as I go past
And in the faces of the people that pass me in the street
And when I find him,
I'm going to walk right up to him


And
Probably break down crying.


Because, you see, a long time ago, I found the one that God had made for me
Our pieces fit together in ways I'd never seen before
And although he was still a boy, and I was still a girl
In a world where the adults seem to be the only ones to know about love
Our thoughts became like twine, tying my heart to his,
And his to mine
So that when pulled tight
I could feel him breathe, even on opposite sides of this universe far too big for us to fathom
But mostly just from opposite sides of the playground.


And there were thoughts that no one else could understand but us,
And even though there were words that we didn't yet know,
And our universe was nowhere near big enough to sit on the tip of God's smallest finger
The universe that consisted of unspoken thoughts and of twine and of dirty fingertips
And of the cradles we'd find between branches of trees
To tie ropes and swings to
And to grow a love that grown-ups could never understand
But was as real as the conversations of the stars above us
Talking to no one in particular of the time they once found a reason to change orbit,
Speaking of the one lonely planet that had once filled their night sky with the certainty
Of dinner waiting for us at home.


And so when I find God,
Because he's been hiding from me for so long
I will ask him
What sort of scissors do you need to cut through memory
Because those strings that I tied when I was apparently too young to know any better
Have not yet come undone
And when I awake in the middle of the night next to a man that is as far from me as
Those lonely stars from the planets that were once their all
I can feel that boys heart beat
And I know that if I whisper
Wherever in the world he happens to be
He will still hear me
For those cords that we clumsily tied with our young fingers
And wrapped so tightly about our hearts
Are still here
And although muscle and tissue has grown over them
Like the bark that has grown over the ropes that we left dangling from the trees
I fear
That if I ever did try to untie them
I would bleed to death before I ever got the chance.


And so I look for God on the backs of strangers necks and in the bottoms of glasses in musty old pubs
And in the smell of the trees that remind me of you
And I'll keep on looking, even though I know it's probably in vain
Because the smell of the trees won't bring that boy back to me,
And the necks that I search bring me no closer to finding the neck of the one I so long to kiss
And the bottoms of those glasses only bring me closer to the bottom of my own heart
Where I'll find myself stumbling and bruising that other bottom of mine
Trying drunkenly to find my way back to the home I've made in this universe.


To the home that was meant to be ours
That I now live in alone
With a man that knows nothing of fingertips and stars
And the way that people orbit each other
Tied together with tiny bits of string
In the universe that still holds it's traces of us
And although there's not much which I don't know,
And the things I don't yet know about,
I haven't yet found out what they are.
But without you, my universe has dropped
And is floating somewhere
Lost in the lower part of God's beard, the part which rests on his chest
And moves, rising and falling with the breath of an ever expanding universe
Next to the first morning and the colours that only he and people who know such a love can see.


And I search for God in the face of the little girl that was meant to be ours,
In the eyes that should be green
And a little bit too much like a cows.
And in the shape of her fingernails I look for traces of you
I search for the curl of your hair, your corners mimicked on her tiny form
To find only the parts that you left behind with me
When a wind, far too cold for me to handle
Swept you off to orbit another lonely star.


And so when I find God,
And approach him with one finger pointed and a fight to pick,
Just before I break down,
And only nanoseconds before collapsing into a black hole at the end of my life
And I realise that all this time I've been looking through the stained glass window at a life
Which I'm not sure really belonged to me in the first place
I'll ask him


Why?




This is my first attempt at spoken word poetry, but hopefully still works just reading it. I'll read it out for you if you just ask!

So how do I slow down from here?

All the creatures living in my head stood still that day, standing sentinenel, guarding parts of myself I didn't even know needed protection. Keeping my heart from shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, I guess. Not that it seems to be a problem. I think you took my heart with you.

I got the call on a tuesday. It was raining outside, I was standing in our kitchen, about to make us tea for when you got home. I remember it quite clearly. Remember the phone ringing. I thought it was you so I answered with a funny accent. I remember sinking down to the floor, leaning against the cupboard doors, speechless. I remember assuring the gentleman on the other end that it was all well, that I would be around in an hour. Where was the address again? Oh, that's right, I know. I've passed there before.

I never was a good liar. They knew. Each and every one of the staff knew. I busied myself with reading and re-reading the forms that I couldn't tell you a world of now. I made feeble jokes with the lady in the waiting room. I inspected the ceiling, read every page of each magazine on the IKEA coffee table, picked at my nails. I asked for another half an hour, I just wanted to finish reading this article. I just couldn't face reality.

Not without you.

And when I finally walked through our front door, the house was silent, as if everything in it knew you were gone.

Your ghost was here last week. I could feel you standing behind me as I sat, restless and alone on the floor in front of the couch. We never really sat on the couch. I think they were more for show, to try and convince visitors that we were actually normal people. I don't think it ever really worked.

We used to go to IKEA and play hide and seek. I would be breathless with laughter, collapsed on some part of their swedish furniture while you would act sensible when staff came over to offer unwarranted assistance. You would start up a conversation while I attempted to inhale my laughter to a point where I was sure it was bad for me. I'd walk over to you, and you'd look sideways at me, eyes wild, and raise your eyebrows in acknowledgement. We could have an unspoken conversation, understanding everything that was going through both of our minds while you seamlessly, effortlessly continued your conversation.

I don't go there anymore. I don't think I can. I see you too much there.
'Am I a terrible person?' I asked your mother. We call eachother almost everyday, but rarely say anything.
'You miss him, don't you?' She asked in response.
Silent filled the air, thick and unpenetrable. Even our conversation was bare without you in it.

I almost threw everything out last monday. A new start, I said. I'll move across the city, across the country, across the world. I resolved to go to the travel agents to book tickets, but didn't get as far as the pavement.
'It's not that I can't leave this town, It's just that... I don't need to.' I said, to nobody in particular.

'Last week I went to the store everyday.' I said to your sister. 'Is that weird? I'd go there with a list of things, but just end up going through each aisle looking at the different packaging, and leave with only a bag of carrots.'
We'd sit at the rickety table in her kitchen, looking everywhere but at each other, while not drinking the tea in front of us.
'It's so hot!', we'd exclaim, both conscious of the fact that neither had finished a cup since last April.
I picked at the tablecloth with burn marks all over it.
'I tried to take up smoking again.' She mumbled, 'You know, to help with the stress.'
I nodded, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.
'I just can't hold onto a ciggarette. My hands shake and I drop them, each time. I can't do it in public, and so I keep burning the table in here.'
'So that's why you put the cloth on?'
'Yes. But I kept trying. I thought if I kept trying I wouldn't drop them.'

I think we just needed someone through which to hold onto you.

I had a dream about our children last night. You were there. We had decided that life was not enough for us, so we turned a red double decker bus into our new house and travelled around the country with an old grandfather clock, playing music and dancing underneath the stars, cooking food out of fires in barrels. I was pregnant, and our son would be born with blonde hair, even though both yours and mine is brown.

I woke up gasping. My lungs were cold. Even after that, I was still too numb to cry.

You were just too good, too wholesome.
'People can't live like that all the time', your mother said to me on Thursday. 'The angels get restless, people aren't supposed to be that good.'
'I haven't cried yet.' I admitted, 'Is that normal?'
'Were you ever normal?' She replied.
I bit my lip, stirring more honey into the cup of tea I would never finish.
'It will come. One day it will hit you, and you won't be able to breathe, and then you won't be able to stop. Sometimes it just takes time'

Time. With you time stood still. Now anything faster than that is almost unbearable.

And all I want is it to stop.

So how do I slow down from here?

A memoir of you.

It is a part of human nature to collect things. Accumulating, stockpiling, gathering. Items, memories, people, bringing each closer and closer to oneself, in an act to recreate in our minds eye the best and worst moments of our lives. It is a living, breathing, pulsing membrane surrounding each who dwells in the earth, each who fills one’s lungs with air. Silently, in gathering, one creates for oneself a finely wrought Interpol consisting of each heart beat, every conversation, every smell that ties itself to past experiences, the memory of the feel of light against the skin. And in this web, carefully yet unconsciously constructed and finely strung about one’s shoulders, we find dwelling in its midst a piece of the same person. You look somehow different to each who knows you, yet still vaguely the same. The same eyes, the same smile. Yet in each viewpoint, you change, however slightly, becoming more different and somehow more unique to each that knows you. Yet the same similarity stands for each who holds a piece of you- your unmistakable, tangible absence.

So when did it all begin?
I try looking back over our years, over the time we spent together, searching for the signs that we must have missed. You always said that time went too fast. That things should just slow down. That everything was just far too fast-paced for you to handle. I wondered if time functioned differently for you, whether days, hours and seconds just moved in a different pattern than for the rest of us.

That summer you made me switch rooms with you, from east to west, west to east. You said you couldn't stand how early the sun rose, that it was just a reminder of wasted days.
I loved waking up in the early morning, seeing the sun's first rays creep lazily through the slats in your wooden blinds. I had made you promise that I could keep them on your windows; you wouldn't need them in my room. So you slept westward, always waiting until the sun had set before entering your room, so you could forget the passing of days.

Did you expect it all along? If a gypsy woman approached us in the street a year ago, say at that fair on Midsummer Eve, with all the lights, the garlands of flowers, the sweet smell of grass rising with the heat. If amidst all this, she had looked you in the eyes and saw everything we had searched so long for, and after that, cupped her wrinkled hand to your ear to whisper to you how you would go, would it have made a difference? Would you have looked at her in denial, and strove to prove her wrong? Or would you have nodded quietly inside yourself, as if you always knew that one day it would soon become too much.

Too much. The richness of the dark chocolate you would insist was the only sort you could eat, so bittersweet it would make your eyes water. The neon lights across the road, flashing over and over in the same patterns, each minute, each hour, each day. The excess of wine, the too deep conversations, the stifling heat. The way my feet would always be too cold against your leg, the lack of
pauses
commas
full stops.
The boiling coffee you would spill a few drops of in the same place each morning. The tiny skeleton of a bird we found, the first time we looked on the roof. The smell of the Chinese restaurants, thick with memories of your first overseas trip.

I think the air was always thick with memories for you. The summer trees, under which you had your first kiss. The smell of another's neck. The salty smell of hands and feet and skin and hair after a day by the ocean. The rusting pipes in the alley next to the grocers. In the smell of gardens in springtime, the overwhelming scent of herbs and fruit blooming. The old leather jacket your father used to wear. The books you would bring home for me to pulse hungrily through the pages, leaning in closer and closer. The smell of the first winter morning of the year, standing silent and crisp against the sharp blue sky, clear from clouds, as if a wind had blown each whisp away. Holding the hands of your beloved in a field, small yellow flowers dotting though the deep green, our feet damp with morning dew, hair brushed out of our eyes, surrounded by fresh, new light.
And maybe, despite everything that we held, you just wanted to escape from it all.

And with your absence, with facing each day wincing, as if the bleak reality of it all had slapped the faces you once would kiss, how do we escape?
If I close my eyes I can see it the way it used to be. The way it was once, back when we were children. 

I carry around your memory, like a map in an unknown city. Like the cigarettes I promise myself, year after year, to give up. Like the smell of the sea, it's a memory that lives with those memories of you, dwelling in the recesses of the olfactory, waiting for the moment of remembrance, bringing with it waves of nostalgia.

I wanted to promise you the world that day. The day it smelt for the first time of spring, the air rich with light. The day we lay on the fresh morning grass and searched the horizon for clouds, regardless of the dew and the damp that seeped through clothes to touch our skin. 

There was so much that I wanted to promise you, but even then, my glass heart relented, and I said nothing. For fear that I was offering more than you would ask of me, for fear that the earth, the sun, the sky, already had stolen your heart and you would have no more room for me.

You told me, years later, that you had waited for me to speak, thinking that your own lips were made of glass, and to talk would cause you to shatter into delicate shards and pieces in front of me. I shared with you the same fear I held, and we laughed bitterly at our loss. 

For somewhere along the lines, we had been taught that though we are not made of glass, we still may shatter. 

And thus, we became stone, deeper and stronger, colder and more distant, hiding beneath a thin layer of skin, of warmth and humanity. And the memory of what could have been, the joyful kisses each morning, the giving of one’s heart so completely and without abandon to another, was caught up in the fine lace of our existence, to hover above us in our Interpol as we attempted to live as broken things, pretending to be something more solid than we are.

And the day you left, that too was swept up, a cold grey memory to plague us in our sleep, to fill our web with memories of you, until we have no more room left for living, and the things that once seemed so natural abandoned us in order for you to maintain your place. Words to poems we once loved, lyrics to songs become lost, because they fail to remind us of you. Books read to us as children disappear, as our subconscious strives to hold you, to recreate you out of pieces of our own lives that we so willingly tied to yours. And suddenly, our whole existence becomes not our own, but yours, filled with fragments of ordinary life, in the hope that this shadow could contain you, and us, together.

So we float, as well as stones do, and drift, as in a shadow of life. We boil the kettle, open and close windows, take out the garbage, and live the ordinary life that we thought we lived before you. We visit the places we once went together, sitting in silence in the rooms that once held our laughter. We lose things; we find things, while never finding the thing we've lost forever. We call each other, each lonely ghost, to sit with silence on both ends, knowing but never saying that it was you who filled our conversations. We dream of old days, we use the memory of trees, of weather, of the yellow shirt and bare feet to create these new memories, entangling us in our own webs, causing us to fall painfully, crashing onto the hardwood floors and the carpet with your coffee stain, shattering our illusions, so all we're stuck with is the glaring hum of reality.

Reality. In the bottles of wine, left over from goodness knows when, because I can't bring myself to do anything with them. Last Tuesday night, when I woke in the night, reaching over for your hand, your face, to find you were gone. In your sister's scrawled note she left, 'I'm sorry', only to say it over and over again in the recovery wards. In the trail of things, dropped in pathways, through doorways, on floors, because we have no strength to hold onto you anymore.

But we still can't let go.








This is another of those fabled short-story submissions I never go on about, but write all the same. I've put parts up in other stories before, I believe, but this is it, in it's entirety.

Breakable Girls and Boys

Contained in the human body, there are more intricacies than in the house you live in. Your brain has more connections in it than the universe has atoms. Your skin, the largest membrane you own, can when injured, repair itself. If, by chance, when cutting the tomatoes for your dinner, you accidentally slice into your skin, a glorious thing happens. From the moment your body perceives an injury, your brain subconsciously sends messages to various operating systems that, before such an injury, you never knew existed. Adrenaline kicks in to prevent shock. White blood cells begin to gather and ward off unwelcome infections. They then congeal to form a protective casing over the wound, stopping bleeding, and preventing it from infection. When this heals, the skin will for a time depending on the severity of the wound, hold in itself a memory, a scar. Occasionally, that scar will fade as the skin continues to revive itself, shedding old layers like one sheds dirty, wet clothes at the end of a day.

When a universe becomes injured, per say, as in the case of colliding galaxies or stars at the end of their life span, there is an entirely different process. When a star in supernova form collapses, the matter is compressed inwards before evaporating into nonexistence. The action forms a gravitational pull known as an event path, a surface to draw to it all in it's pull. This is a continuing process, one which constantly compresses and collapses all particles. Black holes absorb all that fall past the point of no return, into the gravitational pull. The core of these universal enigmas are assumed to emit radiation to a point which disintegrates all matter within it, before eventually evaporating itself. And when it does, the process lasts only the briefest nanosecond, yet exudes more than 200 times more luminosity than the sun.

And yet with all the wonder of a universe that has it's own disposal system, with all the colliding galaxies and supernovas and compressed and collapsible matter which spans distances thousands of times bigger than our solar system, in which the place you live is the fifth smallest planet, your brain can send out undetectable messages and can heal the cut on your finger, all without your conscious effort.

That's the thing. We break, and we heal. When something goes wrong, when we slice our finger or graze our knee, we don't collapse, compress and evaporate, we heal. So although the skin that enshrouds you may be one of the weakest membranes in the universe, delicate with it's intricacies, and although that mind of yours, which commands your body to function can sometimes make you believe falsities, and that heart which pumps the blood and oxygen to each part of your body can sometimes ache more than you think you can bear,
Remember.
There is a reason you heal and do not become nothing more than an unreflective gravitational abyss. The weight of existence is not so much that to fail at carrying it, to actually hurt and feel it, would mean that you ceased to be. 

Nothing, my dear, is yet so extreme.

The sea, it has no memory

When he was younger his father went away. They told him he had gone to the seaside.

When he asked about his father’s return, they replied with broken sentences, half looks and second hand embraces. The life he had come home to that afternoon had altered, and nothing would be full again, whole again, and he could never comprehend how the sea could change something so absolutely.

He waited for his father’s return. Summer nights he would spend on the veranda, half sleeping, half expecting his father’s familiar form to return, dripping wet but whole, alive. Holding onto a vague expectancy that he would return, he would beg to go to the beach to look for him. He would stand, hour after hour staring into the mist and the foam and the salt, calling out, like one would cry out to a lost dog, searching the horizon for that distant shape of familiarity, the recognition of hope restored.

His mother found she could no longer look at him. In later years he knew it to be because they had the same eyes. The same smile. The same unconscious look of seeing through to ones soul. She couldn’t stand to see such a reminder of her failings in a shadow of the one she loved.

Again, he wondered how the sea could take something away from you like that.

I met him when I was nineteen. He was months older then I, but years so in his head. Built around the shell of a long faded past, he was melancholic, desperate for intimacy, a lonely soul. His life had never provided him with company. Tragedy had always been commonplace in his family and I knew almost nothing of what it felt like to know sorrow with such familiarity.

I had family in faraway places. The problem with dreamers is that they’re never happy with living a normal life. They had all chased and chased, becoming one with their futures. And I, I had fallen behind, the moment I had legs to stand on.

I asked him once, why the seaside?
He replied that the sea has no memory, that once you go in, you can forget forever.
And what if you don’t forget? What if you can’t forget? Some things stick around, like that stain you know will never leave.
‘You just do. You have to.’ he said to me, half whispering as we lay side by side in a bed big enough for three.
I looked at him. He lowered his eyes. ‘There are some things you just can’t see. Some things are just too much to know. Life sings too loudly, and you just have to close a few windows so you don’t fall over from the weight of it all.’

Even when he was in his dark place, he still managed to be poetic. That was one of the things I loved about him. He could find beauty in the most shadowy places, and bring it to light. I always thought that was how he found me.

He spent years staring out at the ocean, knowing that it was never the seaside to which his father left, but to somewhere much darker.

And in that lifetime of irrevocable loss, we each found understanding, comfort in each other’s company. Three souls, banding together against the wind, the rain and the snow.

His mother became my mother; they became the family I never knew. She’d travel halfway across the country to visit and we’d spend days sitting in silence, comfortable enough with each other’s presence to find no need for small talk. Three of us in a castle, a house too expansive. We only occupied four rooms between us, and the rest of the house breathed, whispering secrets amongst itself, knowing that we were too full of sorrow to listen, too lost in the broken, crumbling fortresses of our own hearts to care.

‘Last week I went to the store every day.’ I said to your mother when we, for a turn, visited her cottage by the sea. ‘Is that weird? I’d go there with a list of things, but just end up going through each aisle looking at all the different packaging, and leave with only a bag of carrots, or a carton of milk or something like that.’
We’d sit at the rickety table in her kitchen, looking everywhere but at each other, both as lost in our past as the other, while not drinking the tea in front of us.
‘It’s so hot!’ We’d exclaim, both partly conscious of the fact that neither had finished a cup since last April.
I picked at the tablecloth with burn marks all over it.
‘I tried to take up smoking again’ She mumbled, ‘you know, to help with the stress.’
I nodded, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.
‘I just can’t hold onto a cigarette. My hands shake and I drop them, each time. I can’t do it in public, and so I keep burning the table in here.’
‘So that’s why you put the cloth on?’
‘Yes. But I keep trying. I thought if I kept trying I wouldn’t drop them.’

I think we just needed something to hold onto.

That September I turned twenty one. The life inside me multiplied and I found myself with an appetite for more than just us. We celebrated with watered down juice and dry biscuits in the most extravagant glassware our crumbling house could provide. Eight months, two weeks and four days passed. Two hundred and sixty two days. Six thousand, two hundred and eighty eight hours.

I never told him that I could sing, a remnant from my brief family history. He found me one evening. I was home, I thought alone, washing dishes in our ancient kitchen, singing an old sincere gospel tune my mother used to sing.


Oh, come down to the water
To the water to pray
He’s callin’ you sinners and all ye in pain
He calls me to the water
Where the tears and the aches
Where the fretful find peace, the weary His face

Oh Holy, our Saviour
By the water you wait
Strippin’ of pride and strippin’ of hate
Oh, He calls me to the water
To the water to pray
By the water you dwell
By the water truth reigns


By the time I had realised he was home, he was sitting on our dining room table, shoes off, entranced. He asked me why I had never sung before.
‘I don’t know.’ I replied, amused at the attention. ‘I just never have had reason to before now.’

That summer it became like a game for us. I would sing a few lines and he would come racing in, where I would sombrely pretend that I had never sung and he that he’d never tried to catch me.

In June we became five. Our mother and we found reason to hold on, tiny pink hands and feet to tie ourselves to, to live for. July brought constant visits, famine and drought, and everything we owned was stretched to the limit.

He was at work, when his mother, our mother, on one of her increasing visits, began to speak of the seaside.
We sat in the aging kitchen of our ancient fortress, holding fast to the young life that her son and I had begat, and before I knew it, her grip began to slacken, slipping with each passing moment.
‘I never know what to do anymore. I can barely look at him, still. After all these years, I still see his father.’ She said to me, pulling at a napkin.
‘I don’t think you’ll ever stop seeing him, that’s the thing.’
‘I don’t know if I want to stop seeing him now’ she sighed. ‘Is that normal?’
I bit my lip, stirring more honey into the cup of tea I would never finish.
‘I just don’t know anymore. Life is just getting too heavy. The weight of it all, it’s crushing me slowly’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I just don’t know how long I can last.’
I shifted silently in my seat.
‘I see him everywhere, you know. It’s not healthy.’ She sighed, becoming more drawn with each breath. ‘When I close my eyes. When I wake up. On the backs of strangers. In cars, in sunsets, in moments we once shared, long before we knew sorrow. Long before I knew what it was like to live in an empty house.’
I put my hand on her knee. ‘You’re not alone. We’re with you.’

She put her hand to her mouth and looked away. A single tear fell past the barriers she had built, and in it held all the strings that would tie her to this life.

We were alone in that house after that. She had decided it was time to forget, time to be enveloped by time.

I never used to know what that meant. Not until She left, finding her seaside in the room with all the books, a bottle of tainted wine and the family album.

A Country of Star-Gazers

Once upon a time there was a little boy. This little black haired boy, like all other little black-haired boys, liked playing outside. He liked paper animals and looking at the things around him. And this little boy had a mother, who, like all other mothers of little boys, used to sing to him before he went to sleep, and when he would cry out in the dark, afraid of the night, she would sit beside him, stroke his hair and sing to him. She sung to him of planets, of galaxies, of faraway lands. One night, she began to sing, ‘Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, never let it go away...’
When she sung this song to the little boy, he became no longer afraid of the night. Her voice, though shaky and provincial, made him see the stars, where before he had seen only darkness. He began to feel the wonder of a universe so much bigger and greater than he. And from a very early age, the age where most boys were still looking at the ground, he began to look up. He became captivated by the stars, and was no longer afraid.

After the little boy’s mother had sung that song to him one evening, he looked at her with all the wisdom of the worlds in his seven year old eyes and said to her, ‘You know what mama’,
To which she replied, ‘Yes baby’, as all little boy’s mamas do.
‘One day, I will catch a star. And... And I don’t really mind if I have to go up there to catch it, for it might be too shy to come to me.’
‘And why would anyone be too shy to come to you, my baby?’, she asked.
‘Well, mainly because it hasn’t met me yet.’ He replied, ‘And it must be a long way from its mama and papa. But I don’t mind. I’ll still catch one, one day.’
And the little boy’s mama simply nodded and kissed her baby on the forehead and sang about stars until his eyes grew droopy and sleep whisked him away to another galaxy.

And although that little boy then grew to be a man, he never forgot his dream. Though this dream stayed locked in those parts of the heart set aside for the dreams too precious to share. Locked up for fear they might materialise, and find no strength in this life to hold fast, to shatter into delicate shards in ones hands. Though not one word was whispered to another, this boy still knew that he would one day, somehow catch his falling star.

And once upon a time came a war, smaller than a glass bottle, which declared itself to be bigger than the oceans in which it floated, found its way to the shores of this boy’s home. The stories written in delicate script on the walls of his city, belonging to each person who had ever walked through the alleys, who had ever found love, lost love, created, laughed, cried. The stories worn into the cobbled pavement were wiped out, only to be replaced by the forty foot high letters of chaos and tyranny. The boy heard stories of stars falling from the heavens, tiny supernovas, holding their own ideals of what life is supposed to look like, dropping into towns and cities and deserts and oceans. And each time the boy, who liked looking up, who liked dreaming of galaxies and planets and spots of light in universal darkness, felt each act of violence as a blow to himself, to the things he loved best in the world.

And when the Americans came to drop their own stars over this little boy’s home, he looked up. Upwards to see not what he expected to see, not the image of blissful fantasy that he had created in a lifetime of dreaming, but falling stars all the same. And as he reached out his hands, fingers spread joyously to finally catch that falling star of his, to greet it with all the warm affection of a long lost friend, he became acquainted intimately with the supernova that fell not from the universe, but from a foreign laboratory, that when all he knew to be real had ceased to exist, would still remain as a symbol of sickening conquest. And at the moment when that long awaited star kissed the earth, the world around him turned to ash, and the little boy who liked looking up, who dreamed of bigger things and who grew to be a man still determined to meet that star – became no more.

It was as if everything at that moment was still, frozen into the positions our hearts, like mothers, once taught us. The acceptable behaviour, how ladies and gentlemen act, became filled with a silence that froze the feelings of living that had stopped each person from feeling the stars. In that moment, the moment of obliviation became the art of the greatest forgetting. The forgetting of passion, of the pain that births beauty. The glass heart, the glass soul that was once a delicate city was shattered. The words in stranger’s mouths were frozen, like glaciers, like ice. Slowly they could move, silently, even, but not in ways that any of the living could hear them.

And years later, after the mirror had shattered, the shards still pierce peoples skin and hearts and bind them to each other, to the promise to never forget people like the little boy, who liked paper animals and listening to his mother sing, who always looked up and finally caught his falling star.

Hearts of Glass

If you close your eyes you can see it the way it used to be. The way it was once, back when we were children. 

I carry around your memory, like a map in an unknown city. Like the cigarettes I promise myself, year after year, to give up. Like the smell of the sea, it's a memory that lives with you, dwelling in the recesses of the olfactory, waiting for the moment of remembrance, bringing with it waves of nostalgia.

I wanted to promise you the world that day. It smelt for the first time of spring, the air rich with light. We lay on the fresh morning grass and searched the horizon for clouds. 

There was so much that I wanted to promise you, but even then, my glass heart relented, and I said nothing. For fear that I was offering more than you would ask of me, for fear that the earth, the sun, the sky, already had stolen your heart and you would have no more room for me.

You told me, years later, that you had waited for me to speak, thinking that your own lips were made of glass, and to talk would cause you to shatter into delicate shards and pieces in front of me. I shared with you the same fear I held, and we laughed bitterly at our loss. 

For somewhere along the lines, we had been taught that though we are not made of glass, we still may shatter. 

And thus, we became stone, deeper and stronger, colder and more distant, hiding beneath a thin layer of skin, of warmth and humanity.