Paper Heart.

Take away the strains of being lonely, the nagging forces that pull on the edge of your brain that always remind you that you’re just one person. One person free to walk the earth as they please but always tied down because they have nobody to share it with. Weighted by this boulder of solitude, chipping away at your enthusiasm until all you have left is a feeble spark of longing that threatens to burn you up as soon as you get near it.

Take away everything that made you split in two; patch me up with that sticky masking tape that won’t last forever but will damn well try. It might rip and tear at the edges but if it ever comes away completely there will always be little lines and traces of where it’s been, like the way your eyes wander to a picture frame that was once theirs or a book they lent you and you never returned. Let me feel that between my fingers, hold it to my chest like a child clutching a rag doll for all she’s worth, a fabric personification of care and security.

Untie the ropes from around my arms and get me down off the cross. Nailed on that thing the whole world was mine to see from blood-stained irises, people with partners and lovers and friends and happiness. I’d do anything to feel something as real and as powerful as that, and I’d clutch it so tight my nails would threaten to cut through my skin. I know its not all paper hearts and butterflies, but even when you dangle your snapped kite strings ripped by storm-clouds it makes me want thunder of my own. Just to see what it’s like to know that someone once cared for me. That even though the tape ripped and I’m broken once again, I did feel that paper heart crinkling beneath my fingers, whole and real and not somebody else’s.

Because my own heart feels like paper too and I’m not sure how long I have left before it rips.