Stone Heart

 

           

In the winter all the couples stroll through Times Square wearing layers of clothing to keep the little heat they produce close to their bodies. They wear gloves, however they hold hands anyway, the feeling must not be that of satisfactory. They touch lips in a kiss, with flakes of snow coming between the lovers. Lovers of all ages are out, desperate to take one more breath of cold air into their lungs, before retiring back into their apartments. I sit and observe from my 3rd floor apartment window. I feel nothing close to the excitement I see on their faces. I have imaged it, I have tried to put myself in their place, but I feel nothing of the sort.

            I wake for school the next morning, same as I always do, with thoughts of ending my life. How would I do it? If it were self-inflicted pain, would I even feel it? See, this has been a question I have had for years now. I was told I had a heart of stone, literally. I wasn’t born with it, no, more of a permanent replacement. I used to have a heart, until a man who made my world spin faster than it should took it and didn’t return it, and I hate him for it.

             When I try to remember back on my life, I remember a clouded time of warm sunshine. Like a veil that was never really there, a dream perhaps. My past years are fuzzy, a blur of white, and there is only one memory I can focus on in specific. It was a time when I was one of the lovers.

            I may have been in love at one point in my life, but that moment is long gone. Crushed and destroyed into a million tiny pieces, as if someone had taken a hammer to a diamond. That is what happened to my heart. It turned from a red ruby, to black coal. I am not lonely because I don’t know what it would feel like to not be alone. It does not bother me, because I feel no difference.

I like to sit out in the sun, under a Sycamore tree in Central Park, with the sunshine broken by the leaves of a tree branch. My bare feet touching the grass blades. I do it because it looks like a nice thing to do, because the lovers do it. I feel no sensation in the tips of my toes, like the woman next to me, wearing a white baby-doll dress, does. Her hair is wild curls of golden brown, and her lover seems to find her the most intriguing creature on the planet. That was me at one time. I remember what it was like to be so lovely. I touch my heart to see if it beats yet, but feel nothing but a slight cooler temperature. Like a cold draft whirling throughout my body.

            I pick up my belongings, a sketchbook and Hermes bag my mother bought for me in Paris, and head towards my apartment. I live with a roommate, a best friend who I no longer consider a friend. She is beautiful in all senses of the word and I miss her. She is better to me than my mother was, and prepares meals for me when I come back to the apartment. We eat well, the two of us, we eat organic fruits and vegetables and drink wine with our dinner. Food has no taste to me, it is like ash is my mouth, and I eat it because I must. I could stop eating, and end my life that way, but that doesn’t seem like a way to go. I don’t know how she hasn’t had enough of me by now, I don’t talk to her much, only answer her questions of my day. I can tell she cares for me by the face she makes when she thinks I’m not looking. I am breaking her heart, I know it, but I can’t help it.

I go into my room, close my door, and begin to work on my assignment for an Art class at New York University. I enjoy going to school, because it is routine. I do well in my classes, because they are mundane. There is never anything new, it is all so predictable. Unlike in the 6th grade, when we used to have pop quizzes and everyone would get that nervous excitement about what might be on the quiz. But tonight I sketch in my sketchbook. I draw a pineapple flying through the air with smashed strawberries surrounding it, in a starry night sky. I use my crayons and colored pencils my mother bought for me. I draw because I am good at it. That is the only reason. The dim light makes my colors less vibrant than they should look. I finish some touch-ups and put my pencils away. I lit incense, frankincense I bought for a couple cents, because I like the way it looks, and wish I could remember what it smells like. The sensation of smoke in my lungs is one I would die to feel one more time. Cigarettes no longer do the trick. I could sleep my life away, like sleeping beauty, except I have no prince to wake me.   Nonetheless, now it is time for me to rest, so I put a piece of chocolate in my mouth, change into my white nightgown, and climb into my bed. The chocolate is something I do every night, to see if one morning I might wake with a remnant of the taste on my tongue. Dark chocolate used to be my favorite.

            I wake to the call of my name by my empathetic, naive roommate. I lay in bed for what seems to be a timeless amount of the clock stroke, before moving my besieged body. Today is Saturday, the day we are supposed to clean the apartment. I normally sit on the window-bench and watch her clean, then stare out of the window, in turn. Today is no different than any other day, and I see the usual things out of the window. There are blotches of dust particles stuck to the glass, making my view a little less clear. I don’t care much that they are there, however, she insists on cleaning them. She cleans from 9am to 11am as I eat fruit for breakfast in my white nightgown. I could eat poisonous hemlock, that would work, only a little too middle-age for me. I would be Juliet dying for no Romeo. I need something else.

I get dressed to walk to Central Park. I wear a dress that used to fit me beautifully, now it only clings to my bones. It used to be my favorite dress, black with small silver metal pieces fixed on it. 

I leave my apartment, without locking the door behind me. It is around noon, a little earlier than my usual stroll, but I have nothing else planned for the day. People tell me it is a hotter than usual winter, yet I feel no difference. It is a sunny day, and the sun lights up the city in a way I have seen only a couple times before. It is the prettiest way to see the city, without shadows, yet very rare.

I wonder how long a stone can last for. Is it eternity? How do you break a stone?

            I continue to walk on the sidewalk, down past the hotdog stand, with bright yellow cabs flying past me, honking as they go. They are like loud shooting stars, flashes from cameras. I see nothing new today, same lovers in the park, same Sycamore tree, and bench with homeless man on it. I place myself under a tree and lay back with my eyes closed. There is nothing I want or need to look at, so I close them. I see darkness and hear noises of young girls playing near a pond, and birds in a tree. I imagine it in my head, how the water must feel, yet can’t come to a sensation. I open my eyes sometime later, and decide to leave the park. I begin walking back to my apartment, letting the sun reach the unscathed skin on my back. There are lovers walking on the street, holding each other dearly, chatting about the world. The sidewalk is crowded with people, and I make sure not to run into anyone.

There is a man who owns a flower shop on the corner of Central Park S and 7th Ave, and he hands me rose as I pass by him. It is as if he were waiting for me to walk by. The rose is a shade of deep red, and reminds me of something I cannot place in my mind. He gives it to me and I grab it with my left hand, then look down. He was smiling at me, looking straight into my eyes, with a steady, friendly gaze. People at his stand do not understand this encounter, nor do it. I just keep walking. I feel embarrassed to take it, ashamed to walk with it, and confused as to why he gave it to me. I walk down the sidewalk, with my eyes on the cement and rose in hand. I stop walking once I am out of clear view, and look down at the entity resting within my grasp. I lift it to my face, and smell the sweetest fragrance of purity. It pains my heart with the most enjoyable hurt I have ever felt, and I drop the rose to the ground reaching my hands to my chest, feeling the ache in my black stone. I can feel it breaking within my bone cage, I can’t hear anything, and feel lifeless, as if the world were rotating in slow motion and in that moment, I feel it pound.

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

Her feet flew from one end of the room to the other. Solid cherry wood. Her body barely made a sound as it hit. I watched from an inch under the door. There was screaming and there was yelling, but she never opened her mouth.

 

 

He wrote from a desk next to a window (not much of a view of anything, if you ask me). He wrote about a woman whom he loved and who left him (which I don’t blame her for doing so). His stories never got far, there was never a beginning, a middle, or an end to them. Save all but one he had written years ago (and refused to publish, I wouldn’t tell him, but it was the only story he had worth publishing). It sat in a draw in a desk and must be dusty by now. It was a novel he wrote but didn’t think twice of (I could have told him differently, because it could have been a top-seller, but I decided not to). So, he continued to write pointless stories of pointless times (and I continued to say nothing to him).