Mwende NgutiShe’d gone into battle unarmed, unshielded. She was unprotected against his assault upon her. She banked his scent in her mind, a permanent reminder of what happiness smelled of. She spent hours staring into the depths of his eyes, memorising the crook of his smile, hanging onto every word that he said.
He became familiar. The feel of him, his very presence… she was so attuned to it, like the lyrics of a familiar song; she know every single word. He was … home.
She held nothing back. At the back of her mind, she wondered what would happen if somehow they didn’t work out.. but she brushed the thought aside as quickly as it came. There was no way that was going to happen. Only, there was.
She got the wind knocked out of her when he told her. He just, didn’t love her anymore, he said. Just. Like she would say, ‘is that the only reason? Well, thank God! I thought it was something else. Now that that’s cleared up, have a nice life’?
She’d built her life around him. When she thought of the future , she saw them. Together. Suddenly her future was blank.
The tears fell incessantly. After she’d picked up the pieces of heart from the floor, it took weeks, months even, to fit them back together. She got her heart back, only that she had to sew up the gaps. It was never going to be the same.
The blood in her veins had run cold and the beat of her heart had changed . She’d moved on. She was whole. Different, but whole. She built an impermeable wall around her heart. On the outside, there wasn’t much difference. She was happy. Not the happiness that was based on someone else, but on herself.
Eventually, she met a nice guy. Sweet and every girl’s dream. Sardonically, she knew that the old ‘her’ would have fallen at ‘hello’ . But this new ‘her’ couldn’t . Frankenstein hearts don’t feel, after all .