Constellations

She has had her heart broken one too many times, but she thinks everyone else has too. She likes making up stories about the people she sees in the subway, walking down the streets, across the park: every one a glimmering heap of broken glass, all shimmer and reflection and piercing edges of beauty and danger. So she carries her heart, the broken pieces that still haven’t gone missing, inside her, holds them close, always prepared to get it broken once again.

She sees men -people- like cities: her first true love was a man she saw as Buenos Aires, a turbulent love, wild and ever-changing, erratic and intense. Her second boyfriend was Santiago: hot and cold, a love that came in waves, that made her feel like the ground was always moving under her feet. But as for him, she thinks he’s her New York: the place that opens up her heart like a wild wind, the place that forces her eyes up to the sky. She feels that she belongs to him, but he belongs to someone else. 

She sees into him much deeper than everyone else. Somehow, she sees both the fire and the sky in his blue eyes, both the yearning for something magic, uncontrollable, ferocious that still hasn’t arrived, and the desire to settle down, the thirst for a calm that slips between his fingers every time he finds it. She thinks she’s both: the wilderness and the calm, because she thinks she has a river running inside her, sometimes fast, fierce and dangerous, and others still, nurturing, peaceful.

She likes the way her name rolls out of his lips, like an astronomer discovering a star, once and again, for the first time. The way his voice says her name makes her feel brand new, like coming out for air from the depths of the ocean. She doesn’t know how to swim, and yet somehow she always walks right into the deep end. She would like to be happy, yes, but if a choice needs to be made she will always prefer to live an interesting life. That’s how she has had her heart broken so many times. She would walk straight up to him, hand him over her heart, and tell him: here, break it into a million pieces. She would do that if only that was a choice available to her.

Every night her skin wakes up like it was made out of constellations; stars turning on one after the other like a string of fairy lights all over her body. Somehow she feels that he knows this; that he can feel her body calling him from across the dark of the night, that he knows that his fingertips can wake up the stories buried deep within her since centuries ago. Yet, it’s his choice to leave them in their long slumber, waiting for the sky to flip its cards again.