Cherries like Broken Hearts

I have a friend. Who just had her heart broken. I shook my head at her at first. I tsked tsked at her. She shouldn’t have been so silly to fall in love in the first place. But my stance softened eventually. She didn’t act like a school girl with her love. With their desires scrawled all over their exercise books. Bordered by crude, red love hearts and numerous exclamation marks. She hadn’t been so gaudy to write it. She didn’t wince at the sight of him. She didn’t wail in a tear strained voice about how much she missed him and lurrrvvveed him and how he broke her heart and she could never love again. In fact. She had said nothing at all. Not once has his name past her shivering lips.

I guess it was an extraordinary situation. The way the love came about. And it showed me how the sweetest things can originate in the most silent ways.

She was like apples and cherries. Sweet and fresh. The tiniest warble in her voice. She had a porcelain face surrounded by delicate ringlets of silk chocolate. She wasn’t really one for words. She tripped while trying to be charming and witty, her face would flush alarmingly. But oh she could be so elegant. With her deep almond eyes, twisting her limbs this way and that. She lended an intensity to each movement she made. And it was beautiful. But a darkness shifted under her skin. The shadow following her footsteps seemed darker then normal. As if she were continually tormented and restless. She had led a fairly uneventful life and childhood. With two dutiful parents and a younger brother. That sort of blissfully dull, roast lamb with potatoes, barbeques on Sundays, brush your teeth before bed, pink nail polish sort of childhood. The sort that could easily crush your soul. But the kind that easily slips you into society without to much friction. Into the shadows of crowds.

When she met him she was wearing green. He had given her his trademark movie star smile. Dazzling, filled with white teeth, his dimples prominent. The kind of smile that told her to be wary. That was a smile that breaks hearts, she knew them well. The smile of a player. Indeed.

He wasn’t really so much of a player. He had a heart. He was Mr Personality. With such vivacity that left her breathless and energy that kept her continually in awe. He never stopped smiling. He threw his arms open to the world and dared fate to rain on his day. He wasn’t afraid. He just wanted to live every day to the fullest. And he did. People like my friend were always left in his wake. To scared to jump out into the world. He couldn’t wait for them to join him, not when there was so much more to do and experience, so many more people to meet and learn from.

Oh! She knew all this. She made all her judgments from her articulate and analytical observations. She had been watching him flash smiles and break hearts from the moment she met him. She had kept her cinnamon lashes trained on his figure enough to know he would tear her down. She’d fallen for guys like him before. Been burned beyond repair by guys like him before.

Her first love. Or half love. It couldn’t have been real; it was too horrible to be real. Her first love had been a smiler to. But in the end it was more of a smirk. His name had been Rogue (oh the irony). She fell in love with his smile and his tender way of wrapping her up with words. It drove her to the depths of despair the way he had withheld that expression (that lyrical smile that only cherubs and devils could possess) from coming her way. It was her punishment for believing in a shadow of something that didn’t exist. Had never existed. She had fallen so horrifically for him. Tripped over her feet and hopes. Her body had crashed to the ground and echoed. For months she had swallowed his sugar coated lies, dropped just on the curve of her neck. For months she had sighed in the tone only a girl in love could emulate. Just a breathy, wistful sigh filled with the hopes and dreams of a lifetime. She would get caught up in the sound of his voice. He left her in this blanket of half love. He changed his mind, ever the chameleon. He’d met a pretty little blonde thing. With a ruby red smile and acrylic nails. He shed my friend like a snakeskin. So easily he shed her. And left her with his lingering scent, to drown in her tears. He had not even told her why. He just took back his presence and denied it to her. I think what killed her most was the abruptness. How he vanished from her life. She pined for the company of his thoughts. The bare details of his day. For closure.

It had been painful to watch her falter everyday. To stumble about, with a bewildered look pasted to her face, as she tried to understand what she did wrong and why he was doing this to her. It was painful to watch her reclaim herself from that Rogue. She swore everyday. In silent moments, her face would shift, flood with determination. With her knuckles white, pressed hard into her hip she swore. That she would never let that happen to her again. Ever. Then he came along. With his ultra confident airs. Filling her with a mixture of elation and anxiety.

She intrigued him. He was used to people warming to his charms. Of confiding to his sincere, nodding head. He couldn’t get past her walls. She laughed at his jokes, chatted to him candidly about the weather but he had no idea who she was. Who she really was. The girl behind the masks. He was a watcher to. He watched how she shifted and flitted, letting only just the right amount of information into the open. She was guarded all the time. Something in the way she held herself never softened. It pinched at his heart, peaked his interest, the way she protected herself all the time. He wanted to slide his arm around her waist, to make her look at him. To look at him as the person she really was. To look at him with desire.

He didn’t chase her. He was above that. But his smile was always ready and waiting to flash in her direction. He would bring it out at the appropriate moments, dazzle her for a second or two, then put it away for later use. He circled her softly. On his tiptoes. Like a hunter that slowly corners a wide eyed deer. And her cinnamon surrounded eyes were wide. It took months. It took immense effort. Every second counted. Every smile counted. Every slight brush of his finger on her skin counted. Every comment braided with promises counted. Because eventually she let her masks slip from her tight grip. Leaving her true self naked and vulnerable before him.

How can I explain how much she had yearned for him secret? It was the hope inside her. Fluttering nervously, wavering in the doubt that had permeated her being for so long. She was still hurting. She was still licking her wounds with stiff limbs, wrapped around her body like a shield. She couldn’t falter and be sliced apart by honeyed words and facial expressions again. But in spite of herself. She couldn’t not lap up his smiles and attention. All the time, a single thought pounded feverously in her mind. To let herself love again.

Like water rising against the wall of a dam, she couldn’t stop these feelings climbing inside of her. The cracks deepened. And she burst. Everything flooded, and as she watched everything pour out into the open, she was overcome with happiness.

Somehow. Somewhere. It doesn’t matter what happened before or how the situation came about, what mattered was this was the moment they came together. He was standing in front of her, just close enough to make the atmosphere intimate. His head was tilted, so he could look through those cinnamon lashes and into her eyes. She stood close to the wall, her skin feeling the proximity of it. It was night. Later on she would imagine the moment and pencil in rays of moonlight, making them shine silver on the more attractive side of her face. It was dark. She was blushing a little bit. Tenderly, he cupped her face. He didn’t move. The silence was deafening. The heat of his palm grew and she didn’t dare breathe. She kept her lungs squeezed tight against her ribcage. Waiting. Her lips trembled a fraction. Only a fraction. Not enough that he would notice, just enough to betray how his touch controlled her. He let his thumb travel from her cheek, slowly, until it pressed on her plump lower lip. Leaving a soft indent. His thumb was rough against her lip. He just kept gazing into her eyes, swimming in them. She couldn’t look away. She was acutely aware of his thumb, insistently resting on her lip. (That’s when it happened. That’s when the dam wall burst, that very second in time, with his thumb on her lip, her knee shaking, and their eyes deep in each others). She was overcome with happiness. This need to embrace him fully. She shifted her lip a little, and lightly nipped his thumb with her teeth. Just the merest graze. His eyes surged with warmth. His trademark smile shaping his mouth instantly.
“I have wanted you for so long” he crooned achingly, pushing her up against the wall firmly. As his lips descended on hers she could only smile. She was to overcome with need to do anything else.

It wasn’t just bodies rising and falling. Don’t think my friend mistook lust for love. It really was something special. Even I’ll admit that. I’ve never seen two people fit together so perfectly. Like they travelled along the same electric wavelength. Continually feeding of each other, tapping into each others energy. They were both highly sensitive to each other. Oh and it was perfect. It was sigh worthy. It was Mills and Boon all over, the love, the triumph, they way they fitted like the final two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Except for the happy ending. Because there wasn’t one.

They were together three months. I don’t want this to be an anti-climax for you. I guess sometimes even the things that were meant to be weren’t meant to be. One day she said goodbye to him, standing on her doorstep and she kissed him like she wouldn’t ever see him again. Hard, needy, again and again she pressed her lips to his. He gave her his movie star smile and chuckled
“Baby I have to go, but tonight!” and he left, giving her a half wave as he slid into his car seat and drove away. She had felt so complete. Leaning against the doorway, her lips tingling.

He never came back. Not that night. Not that week. Not that month. Who knows what happened to him. Police had investigated into his disappearance, they found out that he had debts with some very unsavoury people. They advised my friend, as she wept hoarsely, that perhaps these characters had dealt with him their own way. Maybe he’d done a runner, with a cheap hooker who he’d wined and dined and gotten into debt with while trying to woo into bed. He wasn’t coming back. Everyone knew he wasn’t coming back. Except for her.

She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t handle it. Not for a long time. How do you re-build yourself when half of yourself is missing? She picked up her discarded masks and put them back on. Her heart bled and dried and grew cold. She was alive, only because she kept breathing. A few months after, she started to get sick. Woozy, dizzy, depressed, she ran to the bathroom every morning and let her stomach convulse violently and empty itself. I made her go see a doctor. A moon faced, warm handed doctor, who closed his eyes when he smiled. It was that doctor that said the two words that changed her life.

“Your Pregnant”

There were tears in her eyes as she lifted her hand to rest on her stomach. It felt warm. She looked outside the window and saw cherry blossoms. The wind blew a few petals free and they ambled down to join the white blanket of petals on the ground. Like confetti. Inside her, next to her growing baby, was a spark of hope. As she thought about her child and the piece of him inside her, the hope swelled. A small, bittersweet smile tore at her mouth. Things would be perfect again.