Deliver Us From Evil

He wrote me in the mud and gloom, fire and death rattling all around. A picture of her taken from an inner pocket peaked from under his thumb. Gazing at it, he laboriously scratched out his heartfelt words. Poured them in love and ink across my pages.

He tried to still the trembling of his fingers, not wanting it to show in the carefully written letters. Teeth chattering, he braced himself for the sound of gunfire, trying not to flinch and blot the paper. Don't want to give her more reasons to worry. He wanted her to think him brave, and worthy of her, and her love.

He sealed me with a kiss, and tucked me into his uniform. I felt his heart beat. I knew, when it thudded harder, that he was thinking of her, and the question he'd written in me, and the answer he hoped for.

I know he prayed, sometimes.

...deliver us from evil...

But there's evil all around, and no escape from it, it seems. Young lives huffed out, their years and potential snatched away in blood and smoke and screams.

I left him, and started my journey from his heart to hers. Thick black lines blotted out some of his efforts, and then I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I never reached my destination. I never felt her graceful fingers tremble in answer to his, her lips pressed to me where his hand had so loving crafted me, line by line.

She must have thought he forgot about her. That he was just another brute who spun pretty promises, and then left in the wreck of them, never to return.

The notion would have tormented him. Just as bad: to think her disappointed by him, after all. Disinterested. Unfazed by his leaving. To imagine that absence had not made fondness for him grow, but rather left it shriveled. Like a neglected houseplant. Or maybe he thought she believed him dead. Found comfort in another man. Made a life with that lucky other. Children, probably. Happiness, maybe.

Their hearts, thinly tethered by the fluttering leaves of me, surely beat for each other for a time. Longing stored in the quiet spaces between each squishy thump. Two hearts, linked by words whispered on paper, and finally broken by shattered promises. Mended in time, but always a crack, paperthin, and filled with wondering and might-have-beens.

It isn't my doing. It's not down to me where I'm delivered or whether I'm mislaid. But if not for me and my misadventures, two lives could have unfolded very differently.

Instead, she could have written her answer back, Yes! to lift him in those freezing wet months, to give him courage against the stink of smoke and death. In his endless quest for dry feet, he'd have drawn some comfort from knowing she thought of him, loved him, waited for him.

For her part, she'd have waited with hope and dread, wishing daily for his safe return. She'd have dressed carefully for his homecoming, and put a flower in her hair. He'd have looked older, more careworn, but his face no less dear to her for all that. Their reunion would have been sweet, so tight would they have crush each other in relief and joy on the train platform. The wedding would've been quick, and they'd have been completely unashamed, in the shadow of so much death, that a life had already taken root in her belly. Because tomorrow is not promised, and none know it better than they do.

But here we are, all three of us sent careening off down different paths, different unions made, different children born.

I've no way to mark the passage of time. Do they still live? If they do, I wonder if, in one of the tomorrows not too far from now, someone will chance upon me and deliver me. I wonder what might happen if I find my way to the hands of my intended. I wonder if that crushing embrace might still happen, a whole lifetime later. Heads grey, eyes lined, and those paperthin cracks splitting open with fresh emotion.

All paper hearts can do is wait and wonder.