One to Another

My heart… it hurt. I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe all my sins were manifesting themselves as this pain. Maybe the sins committed against me were what caused it. I don’t know. All I know is, it hurt.

I was fallen on the floor, clutching at my chest, biting back tears. He walked through the door and immediately flew down to me. I must’ve looked pathetic. But I didn’t really care. Hesitantly, he put his arm around me, to comfort me. And in an instant I melted. No, my mask is what melted. I collapsed into his arms and cried, and cried, and cried.

But you know, his embrace made it hurt even more.

Because it made me a child again. It made me, once more, that tiny little boy, crying for a father’s touch and a mother’s love, crying out, pleading, and never getting what he needed. It reminded me. It reminded me of all those lonely days I spent locked away, dreaming of the sun, until the darkness so enveloped me body and soul, that I could no longer even imagine anything else.

He was only ten years older than me, that Yuki. Or should I say, ten years and a lifetime. I had resented him for that before. His childhood had everything I wanted—loving parents, a happy home, even a sister. He lost it, all of it, except for Yori his twin, but he still had the memories, and that was enough. I would’ve done anything even for that much.

I was already fifteen, for crying out loud. I was experiment number one hundred and thirty-seven, hardened and sharp, jagged and unmovable. But I never realized what the cold was doing. I thought it solidified my mask, but it was beyond that point. Instead it made it brittle, so brittle that a single touch to that delicate place shattered it beyond repair. And just like that, the child came out again. The boy I tried so hard to bury, so that I wouldn’t have to watch him die again and again.

The one who sat beside me said not a word; he just let me cry. He didn’t seem embarrassed, he wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He just sat there, holding me, letting my heart cry out to his. For that one moment in time, he was the father I never had. Forget all the names that were given to me—or don’t forget them, if you can’t. Call me monster, experiment, accident or defect. Call me murderer, weapon, pawn or demon. I don’t care what you call me. I really don’t. But those aren’t what I am, or at least what I was then. I was a child. It was all I was, all I wanted to be, and somehow also… all I couldn’t be.

It hurt. My heart hurt.

For a moment I looked up at him. And I finally understood.

So did his.

I saw one bleeding heart trying to comfort another. One dying man trying to save another. I couldn’t resent him anymore, not when he was giving me what he was. Not when his presence filled, even just a little, a void I’d so acutely felt from birth.

I understood, finally. He played the father, I played the son. In each role we found a comfort in the other that we could not have found alone.

Slowly, our bleeding hearts were healing each other.

Prose practice, a character composition for Matthias Harding

By Elizabeth Chin 8-9-07