Or This is the Other: A short story

For my Natalie~

February 14, 2021

For those in-the-know, Valentine’s Day is “I am Sorry Day” around here. This, because of the story of a girl and a boy; and a moment where the girl broke up with the boy on Valentine’s Day and gave him back his necklace gift.

As the story goes, the girl — always having loved the boy — and the boy- who never stopped loving the girl — didn’t see or hear from each other for more than a while; and in the end, the two reunited and live to fight every day for the love that fills their hearts which were only momentarily broken.

Hence, every year the girl tells the boy, on Valentine’s Day, she’s sorry.

That’s one side of the story.

This is the other, and on this other side lies the genesis of the boy’s endless supply of love for everyone. Meaning you, the reader.

Yes, you. I love you, tell everyone.

~~~

One need not be a rocket surgeon, a brain scientist, or a human being in love to know the heart can cease. Actually and metaphorically speaking, this can occur in many ways. The heart can be gradually brought to a stop meaning beat down by the powers that be, the status quo, the uncompassionate systems, or it can be forced down hard as if shot from the sky as it flies too close to the sun. And yet, somehow, it can be shocked back to full power. Actually and Metaphorically. Sometimes with defibrillator pads, sometimes in birth or in being reborn, sometimes it is with the return of love which — tangled up at the beginning like two quantum particles and shot off into different directions, traveling at different speeds, encountering different obstacles — winds up back at the beginning only to collapse into one another again.

~~~

My heart ceased right in front of an Evergreen making a fantastic attempt to escape the atmosphere. A stone’s throw from the stoop at Nine Hundred and Ninty Five Westwood Ave, where I first met you the year before. My heart stopped working, a few feet from the concrete steps where you looked up at me as the universe was beginning in that moment and somewhere between then and Valentine’s Day, you become mine and I, yours. For a spell, as if under a spell.

Put another way, on this earth, on that street, my heart seized, leaving my throat confused and without power- suspended in between the word don’t, and a lump of lunchroom pizza-food as the body’s way of responding or refuting heartbreak is to upchuck.

Near that tree, you handed me back the hero-shaped box, saying words that sounded like it didn’t feel right to keep the gift and that since I was going off to another school, it was time to “break up.” Your eyes clear with certainty. My mouth making the shape of “ok.” This was before poetry-perhaps- so which one of us could have known we were writing a love poem?

Six houses sat on Staten Island between yours and mine. My hand gripping the box like a lug wrench, I twisted off the bolts of my heart, and by the time I got home, the whole engine of me was taken apart. Sprawled out on the floor of my bedroom in front of a third-hand stereo with a first-rate 8-track player, I was in pieces. I want to believe it was the Turtles singing She’d Rather Be With Me as the track skipped at “Lucky guy is what (skip) I am, tell you why you’ll understand…” But it was more like Rocky Burnett’s Tired of toein’ the line that skipped in the middle because somewhere I can’t remember now and I wasn’t really sure why you were jumping on me baby, you made me cry.

In the wake of you, it came to me that one day the charm on a chain would come out of this box to again adorn your breast. In the fantasy of then, seeing you turn your back to me not to leave, rather to reveal your bare neck to accept the golden “Baby Doll” etched with sparkles as a complement on your alabaster skin.

I hid things in my room under the faux antique oak colored chest of drawers. A curved carved wood molding concealed the feet of the chest . This would be the first time I hid a piece of my heart in this space, and so I lay flat and pushed the necklace box back behind the recess where it was never forgotten and absolutely never to be seen again.

Eleven years later, weathered from near catastrophe from both systems failure and sunburn, I returned to this hiding place to retrieve the shiny relic. As the universe would have it, those two particles shot off into different directions, collided again and so the “fantasy of then” was to become a reality. While shocking, it was not much of a surprise that a thief had been afoot in my former home and that the thief undoubtedly swiped the necklace and other items to hock it for cash to pay a vig on a debt. And be that an entirely other story onto itself, what came from discovering the stolen charm? The same lump in my throat and the inner word “don’t,” with not a damn 8-track in sight.

What came from that was the act of not taking anything lying down. To rather not cast blame on the perpetrator or the past. To accept that I could make my fantasy real still; and so started the quest to forge a new charm. To replace what was stolen — what was taken without my consent or knowledge planted in me the elements of my now endless stores of energy to bring something new into everything I do.

~~~

Now for those in-the-know, you might have heard the boy had to quickly return to his military command and that the girl’s brother had a new charm made in Manhattan and slipped it in her luggage as she traveled abroad to visit the boy in Japan. And upon arriving on Okinawa, like she once arrived on Staten Island, they met each other again for the first time; and the boy retrieved the charm, and his “fantasy of then” became a reality for them. And if you see this girl around town you might now and again catch a glimpse of her wearing the now fabled charm.

Because that is life, love.

Charming.

Some things can be stolen, bashed and broken — hearts are just one. Life can be cut short by human hands and minds, by disease or time.

Now to turn into oneself and find the charm within?

To turn what was taken or lost and make something new?

Each of us can do this for one another if we choose love.

If we are willing to say — I love you.

If we are willing to tell everyone as much.

~~~