| For my first entry in my new journal the inspiration for my name....a story. |
[Oct. 4th, 2004|10:54 pm] |
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How to have a broken heart
By: Aurelie Sheehan
First you must believe in the heart. The heart is a leaf off a small tree among other trees. The heart-leaf is red, the red of breathing. In a dream you let your hand wander up the side of your body and touch the smooth edge of the leaf. You are drawn in by a perfume you don’t understand. You have a moment when you seem to have a choice, when your intellect works, when you assess things-lifestyle, hairstyle, hands, accoutrements. These moments are fine and delicate, and you deceive yourself in leaps and bounds. You remember things-you have associations. He reminds you of your first boyfriend. You believe you will be able to resist him. You see everything in a glance. You see cruelty approaching. You seize it and believe you have conquered the cruelty, but instead you have the heart in your hand. You took the heart-leaf off the tree in that momentary confidence, and instead of saving yourself from that blistering cruelty, you let it in. It had been so clear to you that you were going to resist. You were aware of the danger, fully and utterly, because you saw the bear-like hands pouring the baby wine, you saw how the delicate glass looked between those fingers; you saw how the lips moved to receive the wine. And then there was the suitcase. A small affair-smaller than you would take for a trip. You would take everything with you given the chance. There was wind in the suitcase. There was a small pile of smoothed-down heart-leaves, still moist from the tree. The leaves were slipped in between socks and razors, between coming and going, between appearance and dislocation. It’s not love, you say to yourself in hopeless lament. But when you try to repeat the line, to further convince yourself, even these words can’t be spoken. You have been taken in. The raw leaf feels smooth and you trail your fingers like a blind person over the sharpness of the edge. Each side is the same blue-red. In your blind grope you search for imperfection in the color, but it is pure and unalloyed. Yes, you say, eyes closed, this feels like blue, I can feel the temptation here, I can see a distance with clarity, I can see the sky, I can see the changing of the seasons, I can see the inside of a stone here. I know it is red, too, you say to yourself, breathing in, feeling the solidity of this color. So you have the leaf in your hand now. You are responsible for it. You have the impression your eyes are open, but you keep trying to open them. Now you have your eyes focused on the leaf, and you are trying to make the leaf out, but the fine-pointed edges have extended into the five digits of your own hand, the leaf has pressed itself into your skin live a gravestone rubbing, it has curled around the fleshy part of your thumb like a warm, insinuating friend. You take your other hand and you try to pick it off a little on the sides. But the edge is too thin, it’s like peeling plastic wrap: you think you’ve got it, but you haven’t. You hold up your hand and squint, shaking your head, trying to focus and refocus on this. Have you ever had a dream in which you can’t open your eyes? In this situation you can’t close them. But what you see doesn’t seem real or natural, so you keep blinking.
The next step? You put your hand in your pocket and try to walk down the street as If nothing has happened. This makes you feel a little self-conscious, and you can barely mutter hello at the passing people in the street, friends, business associates, and old lovers. Mostly you keep your mouth closed and try to keep them at bay with clipped sentences. You go to the hardware store to pick up some paint- you think you will paint something. You have this nervous vision. You think holding a brush in the hand will give it something to do besides move toward the object, the man. So you go to the hardware store and pick out a fluttery drop-cloth which you will paint on, and you get some clothespins which you will hang the drop-cloth from, and you stand, hands under your arms, in front of the paint selection. You have no notion of color, except for the red-blue feeling. But the colors all lined up here on the shelf with names like Blue Whisper sicken you, they are an atrocity when it comes to the live color in your hand. You pick white. You will paint on a white background. You will paint in your backyard, with the radio on. You bring your selections to the counter and act casual and nonchalant as you wait in line; you steal glances at the man behind the counter, you think he is a policeman. You are impatient with the woman in front of you; counting her change and asking pointed questions about roofing. You envy her concern with tiles. You wonder what it would be like to take advice in so smooth a fashion. When you stand in front of the cash register, you have your sleeve pulled over your hand as if it is missing, like handless people put their empty-space hand in their pockets and pretend. You make some excuse that was not asked for. You blurt out “It happened by accident,” and the man behind the register looks at you blankly, and you try to explain again, and then you see the letters F-A-N-T-A-S-Y spelled out in those cop eyes of his, and you shut up and take your packages with you to your backyard where you intend to use them. But then you realize you are hungry, and you go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, but the red of the heart-leaf-hand smears on your bread and so even this nice peanut-butter sandwich looks unappetizing. You go to the bathroom to brush your teeth, and when you rinse out your mouth the whole sink is bloody with that distinct/indistinct flavor/smell that you recognized and didn’t recognize at the tree itself, and which speaks to you alone. So you run the tap water for a long time.
By the time you return to your backyard it is twilight. You look up at the places the stars will be and you have litany of crass thoughts and cheap emotions. The big white sheet looks appalling, rusting in the wind like a nervous dog. But you put the jar down on the ground anyways and you’ve taken the cap off. You stand there with your arms folded and you can’t see the red trailing from under your arm, down the side of your body, to the ground. You watch the way the sheet becomes phosphorescent as the moon comes up. The sheet begins to hum with the blueness behind the red. The corner flaps up and you are unaccountably startled. It flaps up gently and then slaps down. You try to secure the edge with a stone.
The paint goes on easily and you keep dabbing at it for a while, intent on a certain section. Where you touch the sheet with the white paint, it is opaque, so you are drawing opaque lines in a field of moonlight. You dab together what looks like a leaf, a heart, a hand. It takes a long time. You trace it larger, then smaller, then larger again. By the time you are finished, the whole sheet is wet and stiff with paint, and you can’t see the moon in it anymore. When you step back to admire your work- not that you are in the frame of mind to admire anything- when you step back to at least see what you’ve done, you see that the sheet does not shine, does not flap, does not show signs of a new answer. But you hesitate to take it down. You turn around and go upstairs to your room and go to bed. In bed, it’s as if the bleeding has slowed down. You go the whole night and there is only a little stain on the right-hand side of the bedcovers. When you wake in the morning your hand feels swollen.
Perhaps it’s time to meet the loved one again. And so the phone rings, and when you answer it your palm is wet and red, and the phone nearly slips, but you say yes to a certain meeting at a certain time. You dress your hand up. You put a bracelet on. The hand still looks a bit raw and it’s impossible to hide, really. The bracelet looks garish. You take the bracelet off, you twist the ring off your finger, but then you put it on again. The hand throbs and you look at it and feel afraid. You don’t recognize it. It looks like your hand, like your life, but it is not. It is something else. Yet it masquerades as your hand. You had as an experiment let your hand be seen at a public party, and no one seemed to notice anything different. They all thought it was the same old you and the same old hand. This is a bit confusing, but you know you’re living with a leaf in your hand.
On the way to the meeting your hand is in your lap, and it rests there, waiting. You imagine that it wants to clasp another hand, his hand, because hands come in pairs like that. Your own other hand isn’t up to the task. It, your left hand is the misfit, and it simply keeps things going where it can- it tries to feed you, pay the bills, keep up appearances. You feel a bit lopsided with a mismatched pair of hands. You have an instinct for balance, and you believe the man has the other hand in the pair. You believe in the balance of two hands. You are a little desperate about it. It seems like the only way to heal your own hand. When you imagine the coming union, meeting, matching of hands, you feel very light, except for the weight in your right hand.
Then you are with the man again. There he is, by the tree where the leaf was. You come up to him, a bit bashful about your lumpy hand, listing a little to one side. You keep the hand behind your back. You want to show it immediately but you are afraid. You and the man have a glass of wine together. In the redness of the wine you become temporarily lost, reminded of the redness of the hand and the heart and the leaf. The smoke around your head creates a distance you mistake for the mysterious blue feeling. Slowly, as the red wine stains your lips and throat and body with the same color as your hand, you bring the hand out and let it rest on the bar between you and the man. You think perhaps it will meld with the color of the wine and the blue cigarette smoke. But when he looks down at the raw hand he doesn’t recognize it. Now you realize you are actually hugely disappointed. You wanted it to blend in because you were afraid. Really you want it to be noticed. You say something like, “Do you see the ring on my finger?” Hoping to draw attention to the strange flowering hand. He sees the ring on your finger, but he doesn’t see the hand. He covers your hand with his own clean white one. You are alarmed. Your hand flips over in a last-ditch effort. But the redness of your hand doesn’t stain his, and the white coldness of his hand just makes yours burn.
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