My Jigsaw Puzzle Heart

I hollowed out my happiness for you and fed it to you on a silver spoon. I carved out my smile and sewed it to your face. I bled out all my healing and injected it into you, watching as it emptied from the intravenous drip like oxygen leaving a pair of lungs.

There was a war waging beneath your skin like a fever burning you up. You had a kind of restless tension to you like someone seeking comfort in an electric chair. The weight on your back seemed to be invisible to all except for me and I spent months trying to map out the faint outlines of your sadness as if they were rivers and I might find the source from which they flowed. But the rivers were just neural pathways, the mountains and lakes and oceans all just lobes of the brain. All of your sorrow started and ended with you.

You balanced those problems on my shoulders and I helped you pile them there, careful to put them just so, making sure they didn’t fall, no matter how heavy they became. If I am Atlas, your insecurities are my globe, and you left them precariously piled there as if they weren’t already digging into my skin.

Every day, you begged me to stay, tying ropes to my wrists and drawing up maps where you labelled yourself “home”. At first my reassuring promises came wrapped with bows. Eventually, they fell from me like bark peeling from a tree trunk, only to disappear under leaves and branches and soil and more of your inescapable self-doubt.

In the end, I was not trapped by need but pity. You were dragging me down but swearing that I was holding you up. And how could I ever let you drown alone when you had once faced the floods with me? I owed my jigsaw puzzle heart to your old self, to the point where I would let your current one take it apart. You had healed so many of my wounds that I thought it only fair to hold still while you began creating new ones. If your gun is aimed at someone, let it be me, I thought. I’d rather feel my blood than see yours.

In the end, I held your hands steady as you pulled the trigger. In the end, I spilt my own blood, I suppose.

Your war was forged into a chain around my ankle. You marked yourself as home but then left and took the map with you. You wear my sacrifice like sheep skin and I hide your desertion under my bed like the monster all children fear.

You were a brewing storm and a flash flood synchronising like swimmers. The hurt shocked me like a stroke and grew like an abscess.

I’ve heard love can be as venomous as a taipan’s bite and twice as apocalyptic as a nuclear bomb, but I’m sure friendship is a sniper’s rifle; the kind of unexpected brutality that goes unnoticed until it is too late and someone is bleeding out on the floor, wondering where the bullet came from.

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