deathpixie | NanoWrimo - 30 short stories (Reply)

I was twenty-three and suffering my first real heartbreak. We all know the one: it's the one that leaves a scar, when we're old enough to have moved past infatuation and hormones into serious 'the one' territory. I'd been so convinced that we would share the rest of our lives together... and then I'd found him and my roommate sharing our bed. I'd stammered out something inane, turned around, and gone back home.

My grandmother came to my room, with a cup of camomile tea, a roll of toilet paper and a small wooden box. As I drank the tea and blew my nose, she told me about her own first love, and what her mother had done when it had ended.

"She came to me, as I am coming to you now, with this box. And she told me to put my heart in the box, to keep it safe, until I was ready to use it again. Because love is a very great thing, but a broken heart is a very distracting thing. It gets in the way of what we want to be in life. So, I say to you as my mother said to me, take the box, and use it to keep your heart safe until the day you meet someone who makes you want to take it back again."

My grandmoather was one of the strongest women I'd ever met, making a life for herself in a strange country, alone. I didn't really believe what she was saying, but I took the box from her, and I thanked her. And then I finished my tea and threw the soggy toilet paper in the trash and went on with my life. I found a new apartment and the box came with me, sitting tucked away on a high shelf, almost forgotten.

Years went by. My grandmother died and I went to the funeral, but I didn't cry. I finished school, got a job, worked my way up. Paid my tuition fees, got a better job, a better apartment. Made a name for myself. I dated during this time, but never anything serious. I never really felt it.

And then one night, I ran into that old 'one true love' of mine. It was like the years between had never happened. We talked, we laughed, we went out for dinner, and then drinks. He came back to my apartment. Making love was like being a young woman again. And later, as he lay sprawled in my bed, snoring slightly, I slipped from his embrace and went into the living room and took my grandmother's box down from the shelf. The wood felt slightly warm, even though the air was chilly. I remembered what she'd told me, about locking my heart away, about love being a distraction. I thought about my life so far, the slight distance between me and other people. My employees called me the Ice Maiden when they thought I couldn't hear (and sometimes when I could) and it had become a point of pride, the way I refused to let emotion get in the way of thinking. I was strong, capable... but I was also alone. I thought of the man lying in my bed, and how we would wake together and have breakfast, make love again and then spend the rest of the day talking, about what had gone wrong, about what might go right. He'd eventually move in, and we'd marry, perhaps even have that baby we'd talked about years ago. All that lay before me. All I had to do was open the box my grandmother gave me when I was twenty-three and heartbroken.

I spent a very long time sitting here, the box in my hands. And then I stood, climbed onto a chair, and tucked the box away onto the highest shelf.