Where The Heart Is

There is something that every living person and animal on Earth has. It pumps their blood through their veins and delivers oxygen to the brain. It beats, steadily, every second of every minute of every day. Figuratively, you can give it away, you can steal it, break it, fix it, and return it. You can shatter it, swallow it, lose it, and find it again. Literally, it doesn’t go anywhere. It stays in your chest, safe behind the rib cage, pumping blood throughout your body involuntarily. An organ vital to human and animal survival; a heart. Every living person has one. Technically speaking, of course. Metaphorically speaking, however, my own heart is gone. It’s broken, shattered, into a thousand tiny bits and pieces. My heart, fragile already, had been carrying the weight of the world upon it, a hundred heavy burdens all at once. Under the strain, it began to crack, slowly at first and then faster, finally shattering at the lightest of nudges, the last smallest burden. I watched helplessly as it scattered before me, all around me, in every direction.
         Most of the tiny pieces I could see. Some I cannot. The biggest pieces, the ones most important, are nowhere to be found. They’re lost, missing, gone. I’ve looked everywhere for them, even the most unlikely places. I’ve searched every nook and cranny, every dark corner, every place they could possibly be. But still they’re lost. Almost as if they never existed. I know they did, because without them, I’d never have had a heart in the first place. And I did have a heart, once, and I know this because I remember it. I remember what it was like to feel it pounding in my chest; hear it beating through my ears, to care, to love, and then I remember how it felt as it broke.
         The pieces I can see are safer if I don’t touch them, if I leave them as they fell. I left them there, fearing that if I bothered with them I’d break them further, or cut myself on their sharp edges. But I need to find those other pieces, the missing ones. I need my heart back. In desperation, I set out alone to find them. To find my pieces along the long and broken road I was now walking on would be nothing short of a miracle, as I hadn’t a clue as to where I was going. But determination and hopelessness can sometimes cause a person to do things they wouldn’t otherwise, and I was sure looking for them would be better than simply sitting and waiting for them to return themselves to me. I set off.
         It wasn’t too long I was walking along the road before it suddenly got dark. Not just dark, but a sudden, complete blackness, swallowing me whole. The blackness was cold, unbelievably cold, freezing; I lost all feeling and became numb almost immediately. The ground disappeared, vanished, and I was scared, alone in the freezing dark. The ground couldn’t just evaporate, though; it must be there, even if I couldn’t see it. I pushed myself to keep going. I took a tentative step, felt solid earth beneath my feet, and continued on. With no road to follow, no light to see with, and no sense of direction, it wasn’t too long until I stumbled and fell face-first into the ice cold dirt.  Instead of attempting to get up, instead of trying to get to my feet, I stayed where I was, rolled onto my side, and curled up in a ball on the frozen ground.