[LSPoorEeyorick]

Meg's heart did not break when Angela left. It did not feel broken, exactly, like shards of her heart were slicing cleanly into the organs, the flesh surrounding it. At a cocktail party, when one of their mutual friends accidentally mentioned Angela in passing, the words did not plunge into Meg with ragged pain. They did not draw blood. They did nothing.

She imagined that if a heart was to break, it would need to be brittle in the first place. Cold, smooth, glass. Or it would have to be like bone china; a broken heart would have skeletal ash ground into the fabric of it, to steel a softer material with the powdered remains of what once was strong.

But bone china breaks like any other plate, if hit with enough force. If her heart head been made of such mettle, the jagged edges would already have torn into her ribcage, through her breasts, gashing the soft skin from the inside so the blood would sluice out and release her.

It hadn't. But then, when her heart had felt anything at all, it felt nothing like glass or china. It was not cold, or smooth. It was intangible. It was horrible. It was ablaze. Meg had felt more pain while she was with Angela than she ever had after she was gone.

There was that time they'd driven to the ocean. Meg had never seen it before--they were sophomores at Wesleyan--and Angela's family had once lived in a seaside village a four-hour pitch down the road. They weren't there anymore, but Angela remembered a cove that was difficult to reach.

"Come on, bunny," Angela had tempted. "A free, private beach for a daytrip getaway."

"It's just not practical. I have class early tomorrow, and you have to work tonight."

"Who needs practicality? I'll call in sick."

"You'll get fired again," Meg said.

"I won't," she huffed. "I told them yesterday I was feeling queasy."

"You are sneaky. But we don't have money for a trip."

"We have enough money for gas. You'll weasel some croissants and cheese from the cafeteria for lunch. I’ve got some cheap champagne I lifted from the Merchant of Vino." Angela always was light-fingered. And charming. Meg acquiesced.

They parked the car on a side street, and walked passed row upon row of airy pizza parlors, salt water taffy stands, and stores full of kitsch and flip-flops before they got to a steep, rocky hill. Lost in her own thoughts, Meg continued on for several yards before she realized the other girl had quietly darted over the stones. As she stumbled to catch up with Angela, she concentrated only on the cracks and crevices in her path.

It wasn't until she was well over the impasse that she looked up to see the profile of her lover, already barefoot and dancing along the edge of the shore, waves lapping at her feet. The sun was kissing Angela's shoulders just so, and at that moment Meg felt an aching in her chest. In her stomach. In her teeth. Meg yearned to be closer to Angela-- no, not closer. Touching was good enough. She wanted to be inside her. And not even in a sexual way, she knew, though surely she wanted that as well. But at that instant, she only wanted to curl up into a little ball inside of her. To meld with her. To be her, to have her. The fire she felt in her heart was exquisite, maddening.

Years later, Meg mused, it only made sense that she was left with nothing but ashes.

She stayed in one place. New crops of students sprouted every fall, ebbed predictably in the summers. She never needed to get to know any of the temporary residents of Middletown; in four years they’d probably be brave enough to move on. She hadn’t been.

Meg settled into a position as a grill cook in a shiny diner trailer not far from campus. She kept her head down, her thoughts stymied by constant influx of demands for crispier hash browns and more feta cheese. The cheerful banter of clientele was only white noise.

During her off-hours, she tuned in--tuned out, rather--to old television reruns in order to fill the cavity that had once been filled with ideas, or energy, or motivation. The wretched and repeated storylines hardly registered. Every thought was neutral. Shades of white, of eggshell, of taupe. What she ate, what she wore, what she wanted didn’t even register.

In later months, she felt strong enough to find solace in the movie theater, challenged slightly more by complex relationships and exploding boats.

And then, finally, she returned to books. Reading was an active pastime; she could not zombie her way through literature. Or poetry.

She sat slumped in a wicker chair she’d dragged to the woods behind the diner. She ran her fingertip along the edge of her most recent tome, a collection by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which sat heavily in her lap. She was in control of how the words moved, how they passed over her, how they crumbled into her soul. And she let them.

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun `tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

And there it was again, against her will: that fire, that cursed aching need to see the sun glint off Angela’s hair as she danced on the shore. To run her fingertips across Angela’s stomach, to feel the gooseflesh raise and ripple her soft skin. To hear Angela’s breathing go quicker, shallower, as she lost herself in the throb of her clitoris. And Meg lost herself in the pulse of her own heart, rising like a phoenix from the ashes.