Lightweight Glass Hearts

Mara couldn’t help it. Sometimes things just came over her. Feelings. Urges. One day, the urge might come via a random realization that if she felt like breaking into full-throated song in the middle of a grocery store, no one could actually stop her. Another day, she might be standing on a bridge, admiring the view, and suddenly wonder what would happen if she decided to jump.

It’s not that she wanted to die or even to cause trouble. She just wondered a lot about experiences that sounded oddly freeing – experiences polite society told her respectable people don’t want. Breaking social rules without a care, just to see what people might do. Soaring off the edge of an iron bridge and feeling the wind whistling through her hair with astonishing force before she hit the glass-hard surface of the water below and disintegrated.

She rarely to never acted on her urges, but she loved to think about them every now and again. And when she did act on them – like she eventually did with the whole “singing in the grocery store” option – people’s reactions were priceless. As it turns out, people will do just about anything to avoid interacting with a person doing something strange. Mara found that both amusing and depressing, all at the same time.

*

When Mara was a teenager, her mother used to swear she was under the influence of the devil, and Mara herself didn’t necessarily doubt it. It would certainly explain a lot.

When she was a little girl, she had an imaginary friend, just like a lot of children did. But hers wasn’t another child, a cartoonish mythical creature, or anything similarly benign and comical. Hers was a tall, dark-haired man with a black beard and iridescent, yellow eyes. He smelled smoky and nocturnal, like a freshly lit pipe, and spoke in a strange, backward language Mara could somehow understand despite never having heard such a thing before.

In fact, it was the uncanny, instinctual understanding of that odd mirror language that had long ago convinced Mara those visitations had been only dreams. After all, what else could they be? What normal little girl kept company with a seven-foot man, imaginary or otherwise, who randomly showed up at night to hang out in her room with her?

But when her mother would look at her so strangely and speak of the devil, it made her wonder sometimes. She’d wonder even more when her mother would drag her to various doctors, and those doctors would half agree with those notions.

Meanwhile, Mara couldn’t understand what was so abominably strange about the way she was. She simply called things as she saw them and did what came naturally to her. She sang, she drew, she wrote, she imagined. And when she’d been still for too long, she’d feel a strange pressure start to build inside of her and would relieve it by wandering a while – around town, through the woods, into all the faraway little nooks she’d find in her travels.

And sometimes at night, she’d lie in bed and listen to the wind blowing through the trees outside. As she drifted off to sleep, she’d hear the crickets singing to her in that strange backwards language her long-ago, never-was friend had taught her. And occasionally, if she were very still and very quiet, she would catch the faint whiff of a freshly lit pipe as she drifted off to sleep and then the scent of cold leather as she finally lost consciousness altogether.

*

The day Mara met Daniel felt like a daytime collision with those strange, blurry nights from her childhood. He came into the vintage bookstore where she worked one afternoon and seemed like a person from somewhere else.

After all, he had to be. He took up space differently from anyone else she knew. Everyone else in this town was a white-polo-shirt, decaf-in-the-morning type of person. But Daniel was dark and quiet instead. He even wore a leather jacket that smelled cold and mysterious, like some of the night smells that would pass through Mara’s head when she was drifting off to sleep as a child. He seemed like the type of person whose heart might speak a secret language that was backward, as well.

It seemed inevitable that they would become friends, and so they did. And then they became more, as people often do when they turn out to have a lot in common. Daniel was like Mara in many ways – a bit asocial and more than a little strange. Someone who kept as much to himself as possible and didn’t say much to anyone who wasn’t Mara.

And sometimes even Mara herself couldn’t quite figure him out. Mara was fascinated with Daniel in spite of herself, and she’d occasionally catch herself imagining them having incredible adventures together – cliff diving in the humid summer heat in Mexico while the birds of paradise looked on or building snowmen on top of the Matterhorn. She tried hard to play it cool, but she felt like she would spend every second with him if she could.

Meanwhile, Daniel ran hot and cold. He’d be dialed in and open with her one week, but then the next, he’d get this faraway look in his eyes like he was supposed to be somewhere else. He liked Mara, but it was clear he was still figuring himself out and wasn’t yet sure where he would wind up in life. Maybe it would be at the top of the Matterhorn, but maybe not. He had trouble putting what he felt into words, but sometimes he’d attempt it anyway.

“Do you ever think about what your heart would look like and feel like if you could hold it in your hands for a moment?” Daniel asked Mara out of the blue one rainy afternoon. “Like… what it might be made of?”

“What do you mean?” Mara asked, intrigued.

“I have these dreams about my heart – dreams where I get to see it and hold it,” Daniel replied. “It’s clear and transparent, like glass. But it’s not heavy. It’s light, like a balloon. I have to keep hold of it at all costs, because otherwise, it would rise into the sun and shatter. And then that would be the story of my heart.”

“And do you?” Mara asked. “Keep a hold of it, I mean.”

“Sometimes,” Daniel said pensively. “But it’s always hard to do. I have a lightweight glass heart with an unquenchable urge to rise, and it’s hellbent on doing that, even if it means destroying itself. And there’s no helping that. But I suppose that doesn’t make much sense.”

Mara thought of the day she stood at the edge of the bridge, looking down at the churning river below while fantasizing about jumping. Then she thought of the nighttime visits from the mysterious man who just might have been the devil. And she thought the idea of a lightweight glass heart made perfect sense.

*

The months went by. Daniel stared into the distance with his pensive eyes, and sometimes he’d share his thoughts. They were always impossibly creative and even more impossible to predict. Sometimes, when he’d been dreaming about it again, he’d talk about his lightweight glass heart.

Mara began to picture her own heart similarly – the delicate, frosted twin to Daniel’s heart. It was light, airy, and full. But she didn’t seem to have so much trouble holding onto hers. Despite her heart’s in-built tendency to rise into the sky toward the sun, it was happy where it was. For Mara, finding her place in the world seemed to be a simple matter of figuring out where she belonged, and she had faith that she’d accomplish it someday.

And wherever she belonged, Daniel belonged. He didn’t know it. But Mara was sure that in time, she could teach him. Their hearts were twins, after all. And that being the case, surely they spoke the same backward mirror language – the language they’d been taught by the glassblower who’d made them what they were.

*

The night Daniel disappeared was a night just like any other in every way but one. Mara knew something was wrong when the scent of a freshly lit pipe suddenly filled the room, bringing memories of her childhood flooding back as she was drifting off to sleep in the dark. And she thought she remembered opening her eyes to look briefly into a pair of shimmering yellow ones right next to her in bed, as if their owner were lying on the next pillow over.

A strange and unsettling dream, although familiar. And then the news that Daniel was missing – hadn’t shown up to work or been heard from by his family in many days. And then his body washed ashore on the banks of the rushing river that Mara had gazed down at so many times in the past.

There were strange marks on this body that made the authorities wonder whether it had been foul play, marks that resembled burns of some kind, but Mara thought she knew the truth. Daniel’s lightweight glass heart had become too much to hold onto at long last, and he had finally decided to let go of it. Maybe he’d had some encouragement, and maybe he hadn’t, but Mara supposed it didn’t matter.

And that’s when her own heart began to seem equally hard to hold onto. What if the day eventually came when she couldn’t do it anymore? What if one day she did more than spontaneously start singing showtunes in the freezer section of the grocery store? What if that same bridge called her back one day?

After all was said and done, perhaps it was just as Daniel had always said it was. Maybe a lightweight glass heart just was what it was – a buoyant, rising thing that longs to shatter in the white heat of the midday sun. And perhaps such things weren’t meant to be held after all.