You Will Need:

– a Heart in a jar
– a Knife (sharp)
– a Tarp

Prep:

Lay down tarp on clean surface. Place prybar and knife within reach. Place self on tarp.

Instructions:

Think of your most recent ex. Now, take the knife in your dominant hand. The right one, as this is the right time to do what needs to be done. You often second guess your decisions, like letting your ex move in at all. You two had a good time, for a while, until they left and blocked your number three days after they ripped your heart out.

They were standing in the doorway, putting on their mittens and hat, the van already packed. They had just said, “I can’t win with you anymore.” And you said, “You ripped my heart out. You said you hated me.” You’d said the same thing dozens of times, but this time, they took it like an instruction. This time, their fist went right through your ribcage and their mittened fingers wrapped around your heart. They pulled it out, glanced at it a moment, then tossed it, beating and bloody, at your toes for the last time.

On the floor, the stain remains.

In your dreams, they’re writing songs about you now. About how fragile your heart was, how fragile you are. How they held you up; how they were the stronger one. They used to call themselves the Cornerstone of the Relationship.

You always said, “But there’s only one cornerstone, isn’t there? Wouldn’t it be better to be pillars? Then there could be two of us.”

They said, “I know what I said.”

Now, bring the jar closer to you. It will need to be next to you for what is to come. The heart is still in there, covered in the wooly bits from their mittens when they grabbed it. It’s going to itch when you put it back in. It’s necessary to understand that some things are poison . . . and that some people are even worse.

Your heart has an accurate memory—like this one covered in the evidence of how they last saw you, over their shoulder, giving you the side eye as you crouched down to pick up your heart as the winter wind whistled through the hole in your chest.

The hole has been closing over time. That hasn’t stopped the questions. “Why haven’t you been coming out?” “Why do you seem so hollow?” “Why do you look so placid?”

You didn’t have the heart to answer them, literally or metaphorically. But when your best friend came over and saw your heart in the jar on the kitchen counter, she said you had to get this taken care of ASAP. She brought over sage and salt and did her whole witch thing that did nothing for you except make your nose itch for a week.

It was one more unemployed morning in a year of unemployed mornings that you realized that loneliness begets loneliness. You were staring at your heart slowly beating in its jar, hating it, resenting it, when something your best friend said came back to you.

“You know, we can keep hiding from our own bad energy, or we can take it in ourselves and own it. Manifest it into something else. Or we can, just, die mad, I guess.”

So now, on the tarp, with the knife in your hand—the right one—cut through the healing skin. This is going to hurt, but it’s important to feel something beyond the guilt of false accusations. Cut the skin open in four flaps. When you open it, take a moment to feel the summer air, feel it rushing into the hole in your chest.

When the moment is over, open the jar.

Retrieve the heart and move it gently past the shattered ribs and into your chest. Right into the cavity your ex so brutally tore it from. Place it there, with its scars and its memories and its hurt. This heart has a memory of not only how others hurt it but how you hurt it, too. How you tried to protect it, isolate it. How others did the same.

And now—when you put it in your chest—how you welcomed it home.

A heart given freely is a fragile thing, malleable, changing. Yours grew tougher, grew layers. Picked up silt and dirt from the floor. Codas and refrains of conversation. The pattern from your ex’s shoe as they stomped on it, over and over. You still get bits of their favorite songs stuck in your head as you make your way about the apartment, watering plants, cleaning the counters.

The songs you just can’t shake. But sometimes there are good memories, too.

Those hurt more.

Them standing in the kitchen, heating up marinara sauce. “Is it supposed to be that red?” that’s your voice talking. “It’s from a jar,” they’re saying back. “It’s made from the blood of my enemies.”

The good with the bad. All of it will be put back.

You’ve lived your life soulless for too long.

You feel a dull ache: an ache of how you want someone’s lips on yours, how you want someone’s fingers laced with yours, how you want a brush of someone’s hand on your arm or their fingers running through your hair. These are things you want, that you’ve wanted for so long. It’s time.

It is time.

You’re able to breathe again, for the first time in years. Your heartbeat strikes you with such yearning for the first time in a year. Loneliness made you into a callus, and that’s okay.

That’s okay.

The body knows what it needs. Feel it now, as the ribs fold over to protect the heart. To protect you. Wrap the skin around your bones, worry it closed with your stitching fingers so that you don’t get cold. Now you can hold yourself, hold yourself tight. Taste the sobs on your breath, the shuddering of your body shaking with each wrenching memory.

Now breathe.

You are whole again.

This is permanent; you are permanent. You are a best friend, a needed person—someone people miss when they’re not around. A sibling, a neighbor, a friendly face.

You are more than a mark on the tarp and a stain on the floor and an imprint in your ex’s memory. You’re the reason they write breakup songs. The reason you are crying right now. But most importantly: you are the reason another person smiles at all.