HER

It was the early morning of a freshly hatched winter’s day when it happened in the thick cloak of fog. Perhaps it would have been visible, if anyone had been beside her. With her, between blankets that smelled of loneliness, and suddenly damp of tears that kept dripping from her lashes, as if waking were the most horrible dream. 

Her heart was still beating when she opened her eyes. But how? She could feel it fade. It didn't fall apart like rotting branches, or splinter like bones that are weak. Instead, it atomised like a bomb in an explosion. 

Prior to this day, it had broken in every possible way. Slowly. Suddenly. Violently. Bluntly. Into two pieces and into ten, hundreds, thousands of them. Oftentimes it broke on its own, other times it had been shattered: through carelessness or cruelty, and thrown against the wall, it had left stains, almost like the gray one above her bed. 

But on this winter morning Helen's heart didn't  just break: it disintegrated to its elements, and that’s the worst heartbreak of all. Deep inside the chest, atomising hearts leave a void, as hostile to life as the desert. The painful thing isn't even the moment they’re destroyed. It is not the sudden sting as they fall apart, but the creeping, everlasting agony thereafter. Atomising hearts dissolve into a zillion parts, so tiny that they are invisible. So intangible that they can never be rejoined, and there they linger: a dense fog of splinters, each of which is sharper than a dagger. 

They dig into your skin, poke out your eyes, scratch, and cut, and burn. You feel them on every inch of your body, and when you swallow, their edges almost slit your throat. They are in every breath you take, and when they reach your lungs, you feel like coughing up blood. Eventually, the damage is too much. You bleed to death on the inside: unnoticed, and on the outside only tears are flowing, just like hers this morning. 

What’s brutal, what’s violent enough to atomise a heart? A misguided love, perhaps? Guilt, regret, or death? It was more complicated than that. And so was Helen. 

A sucker for dark poetry, who devoured fairy tales for breakfast. In love with wicked things: tainted love, pale moonlight, midnight magic. Ever since she was ten years old, her heart had spilled its guts to a diary. A red one, with a shiny cover and a metal lock. It was the same one that her hands were reaching for this morning. 

‘Dear diary,’ her atomised heart wrote into it, ‘would you please do me a favour and fuck off?’ She didn't wait for it to answer, but threw it onto the dirty plates in the sink, instead. Along with everything she’d ever felt, she drowned it in freezing cold water, before she slipped on the cloak of darkness and left the house. 

∞∞∞ 

Helen was the last person you would have expected to have an atomised heart. Actually, she used to be known for the opposite: a heart so strong that nothing and no one could break it. That it would disintegrate now, after everything it had endured, was hard to imagine. Nevertheless, Helen would have to imagine it, because in the splintering morning at the end of her street, it was still in splinters. 

Just outside the house of Mrs. Mueller: a widowed, old chatterbox with white hair and a black dog. Until last year, she used to sell tomatoes at the Sunday market. Hardly anything went past her and passing by her house, you would usually hear her window squeak, since it was always hungry for the latest stories off the streets. Like any other day, the window squeaked this morning too, and when Mrs Mueller's head stretched out, her voice did just as well. 

‘Got quite cold, dear, didn't it?’ Sudden worry in her eyes. ‘Are you alright? You don't look so great, no offense.’ 

She asked, as if she wanted to make sure that nothing - not a single thing in the world - was alright. 

‘I've been better,’ Helen murmured. 

A silent sigh, and the heart-shaped age spot on Mrs Mueller’s forehead turned darker: ‘It had to happen sometime, dear. I really started wondering how long anyone could put this away, without tears and broken heart.’ 

In a beat, Helen's atomised heart became alert. 

‘What are you on about? Put what away?’ 

‘Well, you know, we’ve always known that your Tom isn't exactly a great guy, but what he did to you, lately... Just awful!’ 

The black dog started barking, and now that they said it, Mrs Mueller and her dog! Tom had always been a self-declared heartbreaker, but Helen had never believed it. She hadn’t believed anything, except his lies: all of them, without exception. Maybe for exactly this reason what they used to have had passed: like a flame, extinguished by a breeze. But when the stars would creep onto the midnight sky, she’d still think of him, and suddenly they’d shine brighter, such power he'd have over her to this day. 

He'd had it from the start: from the very moment their eyes had met first. In busy rooms, their glances would hold on to each other like drowning men to a saving raft. Sometimes looking at someone moves you straight away. You don't even have to have spoken to know whatever happens next will have utmost importance for your life. 

It had been a sunny day in June. One smile, one word, one glance, and he'd happened to her like a natural disaster. He'd been a hurricane that had carried her away, and - between flying and falling - she hadn't cared where she would land, if he ever were to drop her. Which, suddenly, he had done. 

‘He never deserved you, dear, you know.’ 

Mrs Mueller wasn't standing alone with this opinion. Maybe Helen and Tom could have lasted, if he hadn't assumed the same. If he could only have stayed! But he just couldn't: couldn’t love her. 

‘You like me, huh? Stop! I will ruin your life in ways you cannot even imagine!’ 

One of the first things he'd ever said to her. Outside a lively nightclub, bright stars in the September sky, and the memory of it smelled like smoke machines mixed with sweet perfume. 

‘Look at yourself, then look at me. What's wrong with that picture?’ There wasn’t anything wrong with it then, but eventually everything would be. 

‘You put all your eggs in one basket, dear,’ Mrs Mueller summed it up. ‘It must have been a shock, when he simply dropped it. Who wouldn't have regrets?’ 

Helen. She had given up regret like a vice: cigarettes, alcohol, or chocolate. She didn't regret a thing. Not him, and not herself with him. In fact, she’d do it all over again: would always put all her eggs in one basket. In his, knowing, but not caring that he would make a mess of it. What would life be meant to be if not exactly that?  

Assuming you live it, life is passionate kisses beneath windy September skies, when the streets smell of rain and the body craves connection. It is meant to make you fall, fast and hard, and follow the pull of enchanted hearts. Just like Helen had done it back then. 

She hadn’t just fallen for him, but thrown herself at him. When they'd first met, she'd been taken, yet so taken with him that she couldn't help, but love him. She'd been loving him in torrential rain on the open road: loving him unpredictably, and full of passion. With raindrops on her lips, the taste of his skin on her tongue, and his fingers, buried in her dripping hair. 

‘The one you left for him: he was a good one, wasn't he?’ Mrs Mueller remarked. ‘A good guy. You should have stayed with him!’ 

A good one, sure, and when Helen had told him about the night of passion, he'd done what all the good guys would do: called her a filthy whore who wasn't worthy of love. People like her, he'd claimed, make the world a horrible place, and maybe he'd been right. By now, there was a lot of evidence for that. At the time, however, Helen hadn't deserved the hell he'd put her through. 

For weeks, he'd kept insulting her, kept screaming and wanting to hear that she loved him. How do you love someone who only sees the monster in you, though, and isn’t that what you’d become through the attempt? He'd wanted her to say that he was everything she needed: wanted her to lie to him, but a liar she was not. 

What she really needed was to feel alive. She needed someone who’d speak to her in ways that no one ever had done, and when she would answer, she needed them to listen. She wanted to be taken - forcefully, fiercely, hard - so she’d break into a million parts and could be loved back into one. What she wanted was Tom. 

‘Actually, we’ve known it from the start. Ever since you left the good for the bad guy we’ve known it would break your heart.’ 

We, that was everyone in town. However, no one could have known, because it wasn't what had happened.

‘You wanted to be his beauty, dear, I know,” Mrs Mueller went on, “but some beasts remain just that: a beast.’ 

Helen loved it, his beast. She hadn’t ever been looking to change him. Instead, she’d caught fire for exactly what he was. Until he’d desperately tried to extinguish her flames.

‘What's there to like about me? I'm just a failure, you shouldn't be with me.’ 

Sometimes when he would say it, she’d listen and withdraw, waiting for him to re-fire her. It went on like this for months: for more than a year, he kept reigniting and extinguishing her,  so as to set her back on fire. 

‘That's what I always do,’ he had said some time ago, ’as soon as things get too close I run away.’ 

‘Such an eternal back and forth isn't good for the soul, dear,’ Mrs Mueller claimed. ’You should have left long ago. It was clear to everyone that nothing would ever come of it.’

In fact, it had always been clear to Helen too, but at the same time insignificant. 

‘Where do you want this to go?’ He had recently wondered, his eyes: drenched in daylight.

‘It doesn't have to go anywhere,’ she'd replied, drowning in the gray of his eyes, and saying it, she had meant it.

She could have been everything for him or nothing. What she desperately wanted to be was whatever he needed. Maybe he didn't believe her or he did, but had run out of fuel to stoke new fires.

‘I'm kind of seeing someone now.’ 

Ice water like this he’d last dumped on her flames, and they were smoldering and steaming - perhaps slowly dying - but Helen's heart hadn't fallen apart from it. Single things can maybe break a heart, but dissolving it takes a tightly woven web of cruelties that exert enough pressure to crush it.

‘Thank God, you got rid of him, dear,’ Mrs Mueller sighed. ‘As soon as the pain passes, you'll realize how much better life is without him.’

People get used to a lot of things, and once they’re gone, they’d wean themselves from them again. From people, objects, situations. But a battlefield of atoms in your chest? Can anyone ever get used to that, and if they can: how does it change their lives?

Helen liked hers. Her days weren't full of sunshine, but filled with violent storms. Sometimes they'd leave rainbows in the sky, but maybe it was the storms themselves she enjoyed the most. Moments of excited tension, when every inch underneath your feet would start to tremble, and the sky would darken for an outburst so powerful that your heart would stop beating, and you would barely keep breathing. Can atomised hearts still enjoy moments like this? Probably they cannot. Her punishment, perhaps: a just one for everything that had led her there. 

The most terrible things had happened! Terrible enough to atomise a heart, and call everything into question that she'd ever thought she knew.

‘Until you feel better, dear, just think of people who are off even worse than yourself,’ Mrs Mueller groaned. ‘The family of the poor schlemiel one street over for example. The one who died unexpectedly. Brandtner, he was called, I think.’

Helen's atomised heart stopped beating.

‘What… are you talking about? What happened to him?’

‘Oh, dear! Didn't you hear the police and the ambulance last night? They threw me out of bed at around four am. Must have been an accident. What a terrible misfortune!’

A family man. Two children. A beautiful wife. Helen knew him. Not well, but the way you know people from one street over. You’d meet them in the shop, sometimes wave at them on the street, and talk to them about the weather or something just as insignificant.Although they hadn't been close, Helen felt sorry: more than anyone could have understood.

‘An accident, you said?’ She sighed. ‘The poor family! Does anyone know any details?’

Mrs Mueller didn't. But eventually everything comes to light. The truth will always find you, whether or not you’re looking for it.

 ∞∞∞ 

How long would they have to wait for the truth? The Brandtner family? His blond wife who was standing on the patio, distraught, with her mouth half-open, and empty eyes. The two sons who looked just like him, and were playing in the garden, as if their world were still whole. 

They waved at Helen as she stood by the fence in the afternoon. She kept on standing there for a long time, her arms folded and her gaze rigid, as if she were concentrating on making sure that someone was, indeed, doing worse than herself. 

A cloud of silence misted the house. It was sensible from a distance, like the cold when you approach the ocean. Perhaps Helen had been hoping to feel something here: in a silent street, dreary and desperate, from moment to moment only more and more oppressive. Not for her, though, because no matter how long she would have stayed: atomised hearts can no longer feel. 

When she left the suburban settlement behind in the evening, darkness fell upon the streets. The farmers drove their cattle from the meadows. Trampling hooves were shaking the twilight. Where donkeys had just been standing next to  cows, only jagged tracks in the mud remained. Reminiscing, Helen stopped in front of the fields. 

In her childhood, her grandparents used to keep donkeys: animals which are meant to carry burdens, but reluctant to obey. Back then, their braying used to be hearable from afar and sounded just like home to her. 

She had always admired them: for their long ears that would twitch, alert, at the slightest noise, and for the weight they could shoulder. Her grandfather used to lend them out in town, where they would move old furniture, building rubble, or bulky waste. 

Whenever Helen had been good enough, she’d been allowed to join him as he had tied a cord to their halters and led them after him. The pleasant memory of those mornings tasted sweet. Like light-hearted happiness, and grandpa's favorite candies: raspberry-flavored ones in a thick sugar-coat. Helen remembered every detail as you would only about the things that affected who you became. 

Actually, what she would never forget was one memory in particular. A warm summer morning. The sun had kept dripping through the dense beech leaves above her head, as if it were heated water. They had been working on the house at the end of the street. Still left: only the foundation. One of the donkeys had been heavily loaded with bricks. Its body had hardly still been visible underneath. 

‘He can carry a lot,’ her grandfather had said, soaking his face in morning sun, ‘but at some stage, it gets too much. And then it is a straw - a single one -  that breaks his back.’

 In the distance the donkey had stopped at a steep slope. They had been tugging at him, but he’d kept refusing to move further. 

‘Bad conditions,’ her grandfather had moaned. ‘The load on  him would slip on the flank, so he wouldn't be able to hold it any longer.’ 

The eyes wide open and filled with awe, Helen had been looking at him, as if searching for the meaning of his words on his sun-soaked face. 

‘When straws break donkeys' backs,’ his hoarse voice had added, ‘sometimes it isn't due to the burden itself, but to the circumstances.’ 

If she had only known how important those words would become to her someday!