Matters of the Heart

Heart is but a Tissue

"But what would it change if I tell you anything? Would it give me relief? Would it give me meaning? A reason to hold on? A solution to all my worries?"

"Would it give me my friend back? Would it give me my parents back? Would it give me a shoulder to lean on? To finally rest my head, for me to escape to my dreamland? What will it do?"

He sat up on his elbow letting their conjoined hands rest between them. Finally moving sideways, he looked into her eyes with a fierceness. Even in the dark his big innocent eyes held a sparkle. He had always been like that, holding a twinkle in his eyes that could make real stars envy their brightness.

"It would give you me Li! I'll be your shoulder. I'll be your friend, you can come with me. We can escape to our dreamland then." His voice was enthusiastic. Hope clung to his inflections like a child believing in the security of a future that held no harm.

But Lyra knew better.

She knew. She had always known.

So, she slipped her hand out of his possessive grasp and let it lay limp on her stomach. He was too beautiful a dream, too addictive a hallucination, too eerie a ghost of her vivid memories.

"It would do nothing... It won't bring you back."

The dew on her eyes slowly turned into thicker drops gathering over the surface of her irises

"But I haven't even gone anywhere! Why would I be back?"

No sniffle escaped her but the giant lump lodged in her throat and the few stray tears escaping gave it all away about the state of her heart.

"Li? Why are you crying? Please don't cry!" The panic in his voice only catalyzed the fury of clouds looming over her heart.

"You promised me didn't you? You broke it... what's the point of false hope now, Jeon? Go away... please."

Against her screaming desperation, her sanity knew it was the better judgment. As much as she hated voicing it out, as much as she hated saying his name out of fear of its nightmarish materialization, she couldn't stop it. She had to do it, acknowledge it so it would not break her further.

"But Lyra... I am here now aren't I?" His voice lowered to a delighted whisper; a whisper holding all the reassurances of the world and the things beyond.

His lips found her tear clad cheek sinking their pillowy softness into her skin. His touch was the flutter of a butterfly wing, the tickle of a lost dandelion. The sensitivity of his touch rivalled the rawness of her cold face. The salty tears that had managed to escape from her eyes now clung to his lips. Such profound action sent ripples of shock through her spine and mounds of goosebumps over her body.

"I'll always be here, Li."

A kiss on her nose wetting it slightly with the moistness of tears on his lips

"Please... just let me be with you...?"

Another kiss sinking into the other cheek, the tears there clinging to his cold pink petals.

"But are you there, Jeon?" She closed her eyes failing to restrict her floodgates.

Are you...?

The both of them had sat up by now facing each other. His eyes mirrored the desperation she felt in her heart. The innocence and ignorance broke her worse than what weighed down her present. His arms reached out to hold her and his bomber jacket bright yellow in its color was slowly starting to resemble the flame scorching her skin and bones and heart and soul.

"Lyra..." It was his last desperate plea.

"Jeon..." It was her last call to his name.

That was it; for the misty drops adorning her lashes like dew had finally found their free reign to escape down the sides of her face in a continuous fall. From the depressed fissures under her eyes to the unnoticeable coarse edges of her face and down and down, to her neck onto her chest, blooming and blooming like dead lilies and white roses.

Only this time the tears weren't blooming into sparkly flowers to revive her heart like the revival scene from Tangled. Those tears were to be used as the salty water to layer the newly dug grave where her broken heart lay with the body and memory of the one she had held the dearest in her life.

It was a loss so tantamount that even the tricky denial of her mind could not let her forget the reality of it for some brief moments. She knew any exchange, any loving glance, any ghost touch was just that... a ghost, a hallucination.

An apparition...

Not real.

And definitely not there anymore.

In front of her very eyes, clouded and blurred with the wetness of her heartbreak, she yet again saw him disappearing into soft white particles the color of a white rose - its petals crumbling dissolving to the ground after its death.

And she? She could do nothing but watch and break...

Over and over and over...

Like glass cutting its sharp edges lodged deep into her skin almost becoming a second part of it.

Her hand reached out in a futile attempt to stop it all. To catch a hold of his once warm skin that only seemed to greet her with coldness in her dreams, to entwine her fingers, to pull him close and breathe him in one last time... to properly say goodbye.

Alas the cruelty of time and tide.

Time that shows no mercy and tide, that does not quench the thirsty.

She watched his apparition break apart like her heart and she wailed and wailed until sniffles could be the only sounds her body could muster to expel her agony.

And just like that, the young night witnessed yet another one of the girl's breakdowns as her heart took on all the wrinkles of the tragedies of her past and present. It could do nothing but offer its silence to be filled with the sound of her sniffles as she lay rolled up on the floor... like crumpled paper... like a torn tissue ball.

A/N: I still cannot believe I wrote this. It seems almost foreign yet very dear to my heart. It's about time I had to let it out of my drafts. I hope it's loved and cherished.