Girl Asks Why I Have Never Been In Love
And I tell her how in endless summers, apples would fall from the tree in my parents’ garden. Sometimes they’d drop suddenly, and you’d think there was someone there with you. We’d be sent out with plastic bags to scoop them up before we pulled the weeds. They had to go quickly, because british heat is a thick, unforgiving wool. We’d find the fruit split by stone and melting, candying the air with their decay.
So maybe I found the truth there, covered in maggots long after the first time I was fractured— that hearts don’t break, they die. They get too soft in the middle because the sun promises warmth. They grow weak and ripe. Then, a broken promise. A hard palm. An apology that never comes. And suddenly, the chambers can’t stand to be near one another. The vessels snap, and a still heart hits your diaphragm with a thud so loud, for a moment you think someone’s in there with you. I tell her that I don’t know heartbreak, I just carry corpses in my chest, sweet as cider.
She laughs, unaware that this is a funeral. Because if you carry enough dead things inside your body, they will mistake you for a coffin. They will bury you alive and tender, too distracted by the stench of sugary rot to hear the screams. Underground, it is damp and cold. Maggots writhe and weeds flourish. Your ribs crack from the growing pressure of hearts blackened and fuzzy with mould. Skin weeps of fermented blood. I have never been in love, only under it.
One of these days I will crawl out, and move the marionette of my bones to the choreography of the living. Trick a poor soul into getting flush-cheeked and glassy-eyed on the sweetened flesh beneath my breast. For now I shrug, and tell the girl something crooked and hollow to distract from the fact that love is for those who can fall without breaking, and I am soft as summer apples.
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