Heartbreaker

I suppose we all crave to be loved. It’s a human’s greatest weakness, after all, to hope for such lofty, foolish things. 

   Because like all young girls with a porcelain face as both their blessing and curse, my stony heart is its own awful conundrum--craving so desperately for love, yet equally unable to find it.

    There was the farmer’s boy, who sells me potatoes every morning with a wide-toothed grin. Dopey, like a pig satisfied with a hearty meal, legend has it that he lost a couple brain cells when he was kicked in the head by a horse--I suppose the legend wasn’t too far off. But he was sweet. Picked me bouquets of daffodils every morning from the pastures and tied with a ribbon from his younger sister’s collection. His kisses lay honey-sweet residue on my lips, tantalizing like summer candy floss. 

    Alas, I never had a sweet tooth.

    Then there was the doctor’s son. Scholarly, he was a stick thin boy with a gorgeous shower of curls that, upon inspection, had never been cut nor brushed nor washed. He was handsome in his confidence, though, as if he held the entire universe in his back pocket. I think that unquestionable genius was the reason for his constant misery. In our brief moments of passion, he would always stop himself, look at me, and say, “we’re all just animals this way.”

    I had played with every possible option in my town, each farmboy and scholar and friend of a friend, all to no avail. Their broken hearts crunch under my feet every time I trek into town, and pretty soon the shards were so plentiful that everyone knew my infamous legacy. 

    Heartbreaker. 

    My three brothers were the most ruthless--Irwin, the oldest, would always snicker at the dinner table, “you’d think Petra was trying to start a collection.”

        Their raucous laughter trembled the wooden walls as I took my supper into my bedroom.

         At night, my gaze dwells along the white ceiling, overcast with a sliver of moonlight that has managed to slip through my blinds. My eyes sit heavy with the weight of unshed tears.

         Twenty is so very young. But the end of my prime closes in like black gloves along my throat, suffocating me with the weight of what I am to become:

      A girl so picky she would forever be doomed to drown in the misery of her loneliness. 

       I bunch up the cloth of my bedsheets into my wound fists, biting my bottom lip. Gasping helplessly for air. 

    But then I hear his voice. A plea buried in the deepest folds of my subconscious. Pleading me not to worry, to be patient. Telling me that he’s on his way. 

    And it is that voice, one like the gentle rustling of autumn trees, that coaxes me sweetly in reassurance as I float into a deep and wondrous sleep.

  … 

   The town is flanked by trees--too small to be a proper forest but too large to be a thicket. Yet, always in my dreams, as I wander in wonderlust past the ordinary oak’s brambles and across the babbling stream, the reality morphs, constricting and expanding to house gargantuan spruce, stout birch, and gorgeous maple, canopies sewn together to obstruct the view of the sky. This place, I know, only exists in the folds of my mind, and yet every morning for the past four months I check just to make sure.

   This is also where he lives, the boy in my dreams.

   This is where he greets me with those vast and curious eyes that haven’t had the life kicked out of them by hubris or horse hooves. This is where he extends his long, elegant hand, the simple gesture stabbing more feeling into my heart than a passionate weekend in the town. He wears the rough cloth clothes of farmers, hanging loosely over the lean muscle of his frame, yet his posture suggests a cool confidence that I imagine only a king could have. And that quintessential smile, I swear that I had never seen anything so magnificent, playing like a jester on his lips.

    And yet--

    He bows. “Milady.” 

    The gesture flushes my cheeks, stirs my heart with mild affection. “I’m glad to see you again.”

    He tugs me into an embrace, brushing my cheek with a free hand. “We have a long night ahead of us. But only if you so desire.”

    I slide my fingers across his torso, feeling the warmth underneath those simple clothes. I press myself tighter into him, the solid weight of his body mocking me like a curse. “I don’t understand.”

    “What don’t you understand?”

    “I don’t understand how you can’t be real.”

    His laugh flows like rich cream, thick and chilly out of the pitcher. “I am as real as you think I am, Petra.” He traces the line of my back; I arc towards his touch with a sharp breath. “Tell me: do I feel real?”

     I nod.

     “Then there is no difference between the two,” he releases me, looping my arm with his. “Come on now. The night awaits us.”

  . . .

    Every night, we would explore the cavernous expanse of my dream realm: the colossal trees ambient with soft purple and yellow lights; the brooks that pooled into lakes where he would push me in and laugh as he jumped in right behind me; the small clearings flushed with speckled flowers so beautiful that they would seduce me into drunk laughter. And when at last I awoke to the first glimpses of dawn’s amber light, I would still taste the lingering flavor of his kisses on my lips, until that, too, faded.

     This love was a sin. A sick and utter sin.

     The world is different at dawn. It’s had time to settle into the quiet of the night, swirling with chilly air that has yet to be evaporated by the rising sun. I tread along the empty roads, littered with the hearts that I had broken, but somehow, with me being my only witness in the morning’s quiet, I couldn’t really care. Even the shops, which in an hour’s time would awaken and ridicule my heartlessness, were indifferent to my existence. 

    The dawn didn’t care about my stubborn heart, nor did nature bother itself with the gossip of the town. They all simply sought the beauty of their existences.  

    I found myself at the edge of the woods, peering into its mouth. Hoping to catch any glimpse of the boy from the night before. For a moment, I did see him, beckoning me towards him with a pale, graceful hand. But then the amber glow became gold as the sun reclaimed the morning, and all at once the mirage dissipated into a stick-thin birch tree.

    I don’t know why my heart still sinks.  

    I don’t know why I still indulge my fantasies.

    I sit on the edge of the trees, straining my eyes past the brambles and into the unknown.

    Perhaps I still look because I have nothing to lose. Perhaps because I am the Heartbreaker, the one doomed to never find true love. 

    Or perhaps it is because we are all cursed to crave for love.

    It’s a human’s greatest weakness, after all.