a heart and a soul
by Talia Flores
9/9 2:54 PM
I wish she would stop crying. She has such a beautiful face, and I wish she would stop crying.
It’s raining outside. She sits next to a window and watches drops splash. The rain calms her, makes her whole. She feels like a vesicle of the soil. Each time it rains, she can feel herself soaking up the water. I am the earth, she once told me. I take in water like it takes in rain.
She places her fingertips on the windowpane. Her nails are the same color as the clear droplets.
Are you cold?
I offer her my sweater. She shakes it off – she loves the shiver the windowpane gives her. A freezing current, a cold high.
How are you eating?
I’m not.
I know, and she knows I know. But I can’t help asking.
How are you sleeping?
She turns away. Her down-turned eyes tell me the answer.
It’s hard for her to sleep at night. Daylight shrivels her up like a dusty grape, but moonlight fills her to the brim of her skin. At night, she is injected with stars.
We sit in the torrent of pitter-patter-pitter-patter. Her pupils are wide, and I think if I could touch them, they would feel like a trampoline’s surface – it would bounce back, but a little push and it would snap. I would promise her I would be gentle.
The rain stops. That is my cue to leave – without the torrent to distract her, she says my presence is like a truck horn and it hurts her ears. I get up slowly, careful not to touch her. She hates being touched. She is scared her bubble will pop.
I exit the building, open a black umbrella, and begin the walk back to the bus stop. I check my phone along the way and see texts from my roommate. Three say ‘where r u?’ and one says ‘r u hanging out with that crazy chick again?’ I put my phone in my pocket.
| |
We first met when we were assigned together for a project in our college ecology class. She asked if we could study rivers, and I let her. She asked if she could draw examples, and I let her. She loved drawing. She was a faucet with no handles, streams of ink and graphite flying from her spout.
After the term ended, she invited me to visit her in her dorm. I followed her directions, but was confused to end up at a mental hospital. A surprised receptionist directed me to her room.
She doesn’t get many visitors,
she told me.
Her room was the inside of someone’s mouth. Puddles of water lay on the floor, and the walls were sweating. Later, she told me her room was a flower, sagging with its liquid soul. She was a stick-bug on the flower’s petals, all bone.
Where are your drawings?
I had asked her.
They’re dirty variables,
was her reply.
They soil me.
For some reason, I decided to stay with her. We looked out her window together: soured chocolate eyes and eyes of cold neon watched the rain.
| |
My friends don’t like her – she has a screw loose, they say. Sometimes they ask me if I’m gay. I hang out with her so much, am I sure I’m not banging her in her own insane asylum?
She scoffs at their taunts.
I’m an endangered species,
she says.
She doesn’t say anything about me being gay.
| |
9/10 3:01 PM
Through the double doors of the building, past the suspicious receptionist, down a long hall – mouth, teeth, esophagus. The mental asylum is a monster, and I’ve been chewed and swallowed.
An ocean swirls in her irises; her veins are rivers surging. I pray to God (but would a God ever let a girl like her suffer?) that her dam doesn’t burst.
Are you eating more?
A shake of her head.
Have you gone out?
She narrows her eyebrows. We’ve been through these questions too many times, and the sound of my voice muddies the clean silence.
Two figures on a blank canvas, and the rain is our backdrop. I wanted to put my hand on hers, but I knew she would reach for the small bottle of GermX she wears like a bracelet.
The sky ceases its tears, and she looks up at me. Her eyes are a ‘don’t go’; her hands are an “I need you to leave”. I wave good-bye.
| |
When I was in the third grade, a girl kissed me. We were in the forest behind the school playground; we were two nymphs running, an extension of the rope-like roots of skyscrapers of leaf and bark. Her lips tasted like lotus buns, and her eyelashes brushed against my forehead. Her smile was the orange slice I had eaten for lunch. When it started to rain afterward, the drops fell to the forest ground like a symphony and a mess, the thump-thump of water on soil matching the irregular beat of our hearts.
| |
9/13 3:15 PM
I decide to stop telling my friends that I visit her. When they ask what I do at the mental hospital, I say I volunteer. They don’t push past that. I get a boyfriend, and they don’t ask any more if I’m gay. I don’t ask myself any more if I’m gay.
She isn’t getting better. The sun rises, and the whites of her eyes are tinted yellow; the sun sets, and her breathing is misty. She is a buoy, so filled with water that she is a river of her own. She can’t walk without the help of another, and even sitting is beginning to be an effort.
Why do you do this to yourself?
I must.
Water is her only purity, she says. Anything else contaminates her being. She is an ice cube, a glacier, a sheet of frozen water, glass, a painting made of colored air – one drop of anything, anything, and she is bound to crumble. Her skin would dissolve into the floor.
I am fragile,
she says.
The nurse tells me she is diagnosed with a combination of disorders – major depressive disorder, hypochondriasis, obsessive-compulsive disorder – the doctors can’t pinpoint it.
It’s you who has the disorder, you bitch,
I want to say.
| |
9/27 2:29 PM
I lose my boyfriend.
I wasn’t feeling it,
he said.
Your heart always felt somewhere else,
he said.
My head, my hands, my eyes were all in the right place – but my heart was an unknown variable, a drop of water that wouldn’t fit on my tongue.
| |
When I was in the sixth grade, a girl held my hand. We lay together on a hill, our lungs expanding and deflating in time with the whoosh-whoosh of a world of grass. Our bodies rolled down the hill together, but our minds stayed fixed on the baby-blue sky and its amorphous clouds; her hand brushed mine as we tumbled head over heels head over heels and I got a concussion and a spark.
| |
10/1 4:40 PM
She’s in critical condition now, and the nurse won’t let me see her. Her door is closed – NO VISITORS ALLOWED, a white sign in black print entombs her room. I stand in front of her door for exactly 39 minutes – the nurse had been counting. Each second, I hear the drip of her faucet.
At 40 minutes, the nurse tells me to leave. I refuse. I pound on the nurse’s desk, my mouth a breeding garden for obscenities. The security guards show me to the door. My eyes are screaming –
Don’t make me leave her!
They shout into the cosmos –
but my mouth is locked behind the guards’ arms. They shouted, and I couldn’t hear her faucet any more.
| |
10/1 4:39 PM
When I was a sophomore in college, I kissed a girl. Her wedding dress was a hospital gown, and her engagement ring was an IV tube twirled around her finger. She was a bribe splattered with blood, and my eyes painted tears.
| |
My heart was a wind-up doll. Her heart was a pearl. My heart cried out – so confident, so unabashedly determined to be heard, a forlorn siren. Her heart was hidden, safe behind a shell of teeth and bone.
We were two helicopter seeds at opposite sides of the world, spinning to our doom at a harmonic frequency.
I wish she would stop crying. She has such a beautiful face, and I wish she would stop crying.
It’s raining outside. She sits next to a window and watches drops splash. The rain calms her, makes her whole. She feels like a vesicle of the soil. Each time it rains, she can feel herself soaking up the water. I am the earth, she once told me. I take in water like it takes in rain.
She places her fingertips on the windowpane. Her nails are the same color as the clear droplets.
Are you cold?
I offer her my sweater. She shakes it off – she loves the shiver the windowpane gives her. A freezing current, a cold high.
How are you eating?
I’m not.
I know, and she knows I know. But I can’t help asking.
How are you sleeping?
She turns away. Her down-turned eyes tell me the answer.
It’s hard for her to sleep at night. Daylight shrivels her up like a dusty grape, but moonlight fills her to the brim of her skin. At night, she is injected with stars.
We sit in the torrent of pitter-patter-pitter-patter. Her pupils are wide, and I think if I could touch them, they would feel like a trampoline’s surface – it would bounce back, but a little push and it would snap. I would promise her I would be gentle.
The rain stops. That is my cue to leave – without the torrent to distract her, she says my presence is like a truck horn and it hurts her ears. I get up slowly, careful not to touch her. She hates being touched. She is scared her bubble will pop.
I exit the building, open a black umbrella, and begin the walk back to the bus stop. I check my phone along the way and see texts from my roommate. Three say ‘where r u?’ and one says ‘r u hanging out with that crazy chick again?’ I put my phone in my pocket.
| |
We first met when we were assigned together for a project in our college ecology class. She asked if we could study rivers, and I let her. She asked if she could draw examples, and I let her. She loved drawing. She was a faucet with no handles, streams of ink and graphite flying from her spout.
After the term ended, she invited me to visit her in her dorm. I followed her directions, but was confused to end up at a mental hospital. A surprised receptionist directed me to her room.
She doesn’t get many visitors,
she told me.
Her room was the inside of someone’s mouth. Puddles of water lay on the floor, and the walls were sweating. Later, she told me her room was a flower, sagging with its liquid soul. She was a stick-bug on the flower’s petals, all bone.
Where are your drawings?
I had asked her.
They’re dirty variables,
was her reply.
They soil me.
For some reason, I decided to stay with her. We looked out her window together: soured chocolate eyes and eyes of cold neon watched the rain.
| |
My friends don’t like her – she has a screw loose, they say. Sometimes they ask me if I’m gay. I hang out with her so much, am I sure I’m not banging her in her own insane asylum?
She scoffs at their taunts.
I’m an endangered species,
she says.
She doesn’t say anything about me being gay.
| |
9/10 3:01 PM
Through the double doors of the building, past the suspicious receptionist, down a long hall – mouth, teeth, esophagus. The mental asylum is a monster, and I’ve been chewed and swallowed.
An ocean swirls in her irises; her veins are rivers surging. I pray to God (but would a God ever let a girl like her suffer?) that her dam doesn’t burst.
Are you eating more?
A shake of her head.
Have you gone out?
She narrows her eyebrows. We’ve been through these questions too many times, and the sound of my voice muddies the clean silence.
Two figures on a blank canvas, and the rain is our backdrop. I wanted to put my hand on hers, but I knew she would reach for the small bottle of GermX she wears like a bracelet.
The sky ceases its tears, and she looks up at me. Her eyes are a ‘don’t go’; her hands are an “I need you to leave”. I wave good-bye.
| |
When I was in the third grade, a girl kissed me. We were in the forest behind the school playground; we were two nymphs running, an extension of the rope-like roots of skyscrapers of leaf and bark. Her lips tasted like lotus buns, and her eyelashes brushed against my forehead. Her smile was the orange slice I had eaten for lunch. When it started to rain afterward, the drops fell to the forest ground like a symphony and a mess, the thump-thump of water on soil matching the irregular beat of our hearts.
| |
9/13 3:15 PM
I decide to stop telling my friends that I visit her. When they ask what I do at the mental hospital, I say I volunteer. They don’t push past that. I get a boyfriend, and they don’t ask any more if I’m gay. I don’t ask myself any more if I’m gay.
She isn’t getting better. The sun rises, and the whites of her eyes are tinted yellow; the sun sets, and her breathing is misty. She is a buoy, so filled with water that she is a river of her own. She can’t walk without the help of another, and even sitting is beginning to be an effort.
Why do you do this to yourself?
I must.
Water is her only purity, she says. Anything else contaminates her being. She is an ice cube, a glacier, a sheet of frozen water, glass, a painting made of colored air – one drop of anything, anything, and she is bound to crumble. Her skin would dissolve into the floor.
I am fragile,
she says.
The nurse tells me she is diagnosed with a combination of disorders – major depressive disorder, hypochondriasis, obsessive-compulsive disorder – the doctors can’t pinpoint it.
It’s you who has the disorder, you bitch,
I want to say.
| |
9/27 2:29 PM
I lose my boyfriend.
I wasn’t feeling it,
he said.
Your heart always felt somewhere else,
he said.
My head, my hands, my eyes were all in the right place – but my heart was an unknown variable, a drop of water that wouldn’t fit on my tongue.
| |
When I was in the sixth grade, a girl held my hand. We lay together on a hill, our lungs expanding and deflating in time with the whoosh-whoosh of a world of grass. Our bodies rolled down the hill together, but our minds stayed fixed on the baby-blue sky and its amorphous clouds; her hand brushed mine as we tumbled head over heels head over heels and I got a concussion and a spark.
| |
10/1 4:40 PM
She’s in critical condition now, and the nurse won’t let me see her. Her door is closed – NO VISITORS ALLOWED, a white sign in black print entombs her room. I stand in front of her door for exactly 39 minutes – the nurse had been counting. Each second, I hear the drip of her faucet.
At 40 minutes, the nurse tells me to leave. I refuse. I pound on the nurse’s desk, my mouth a breeding garden for obscenities. The security guards show me to the door. My eyes are screaming –
Don’t make me leave her!
They shout into the cosmos –
but my mouth is locked behind the guards’ arms. They shouted, and I couldn’t hear her faucet any more.
| |
10/1 4:39 PM
When I was a sophomore in college, I kissed a girl. Her wedding dress was a hospital gown, and her engagement ring was an IV tube twirled around her finger. She was a bribe splattered with blood, and my eyes painted tears.
| |
My heart was a wind-up doll. Her heart was a pearl. My heart cried out – so confident, so unabashedly determined to be heard, a forlorn siren. Her heart was hidden, safe behind a shell of teeth and bone.
We were two helicopter seeds at opposite sides of the world, spinning to our doom at a harmonic frequency.