The Adamantine Heart

Concerning the Adamantine Heart:

You first read about it in a comic book. Or maybe a manga. Whatever. It’s an imaginary thing so real you can taste it, based on an alchemical substance harder than diamonds. Adamantine is forever, too.

It's easier than you might think to turn your heart into Adamantine. It sneaks up on you while you are trying to get love right. It blindsides you when your teenage boyfriend drowns in a freak accident. It slides into you when your steady fellow in college smacks you around. It happens when your mother dies, then your father dies. It happens when you walk in on your best friend, hanging nude from your gravity boots while your husband, in a hood, whips her with your riding crop--the one you actually use on your horse.

Holding My Heart in Your hands:

They liken it to puppies. They do this because it's easier than remembering the bleachers, the long, lonely steps and the curious bruising of the irregularly shaped organ. You limp down. Pick it up. Brush the dirt off best you can and stuff it back in your chest. You smile sheepishly, straightening your blouse, wondering where the buttons he ripped off fell.

There's a sick feeling when you try to smile. It's the first time you use your crooked smile, and say, "Heh. Yeah. Well. I guess I'll see you in school Monday?"

No. Really. Holding My Heart in Your Hands:

You could have gone your entire life without knowing why they called it a "sucking" chest wound.

You go back for the checkup and he comes in wearing his long white coat. Only your body has met him. He has a bushy moustache and is thin except for the thickening that happens in a man's fifties. You don't know him from Adam, and smile politely when he says your name.

His eyes light up and he gives you a full body contact hug, the sort you used to share with lovers before the accident. He pushes back from you with both hands on your shoulders and says, "My God! Look at you!" He's your star-crossed soul mate in his familiarity. Then he throws himself down on the floor to show you some exercises he thinks will help. He's ridiculous and adorable. You laugh, a sound still rusty behind the raggedy, pink zipper on your thorax.

It’s like blowing breath on a gem, shining it up, sparkling the fossil heart. You are bedazzled by strangers with good intentions. And sometimes, you weep.

Adamantine, though, is cautiously rigid. So you walk away still alert. Still guarded.

Capturing the Adamantine Heart:

Violence, in the end, is the only way to capture an adamantine heart. It must break, shattering into shards against its twin. Finding that twin is the trick. They come together like dangerous prisms, glinting and hard, sharp and cutting. They slice like knives, shanking, glittering. Miles away, an explosion is heard. Blood will be shed, but no tears. Pick up the shards, grind them like bones, drink them like glass.

The Love Cats

She acquired him with a roundhouse kick. At least that's how the story went. On the streets together at night, they danced and wandered the city looking like The Cure from the early days. Out on the pier they'd stand, looking out to the ocean with opal eyes, boding bad luck. They'd throw things into the sea from time to time. Someone said it was the ashes of their vanquished conquests. Someone else said it was the tiny bones of their hearts. And still another said it was a stack of handwritten valentines delivered into their hands by scores of damaged lovers. No doubt they were a couple, slinking through the night, all black eyeliner and sadness.

Did you know, she'd growl, wrapping her black-leathered thigh around a perfect stranger, bisexuals are the best lovers. Yes, think about it, he'd say, leaning his back against the wall so his hips jutted. We know how to make everyone happy. And you want to be happy. Don't you?

Don't you? She'd echo. If the perfect stranger were perfect enough, they'd take him or her home for a sandwich.

But it was always the same tired argument. There in the kitchen of their apartment over the condiments, he would slyly say, "Morrissey is hotter."

She would savagely rip into a slice of blooded roast beef, smearing a bit of mayonnaise on her slash of a mouth. Her tongue would snake out to catch it and she'd turn on him. "Sacrilege! Robert Smith is the only god. Morrissey sucks!"

Then they'd pounce on each other, clawing and hitting--him throwing his tofu loaf on pumpernickel in her face, her swiping his face with her nails still sticky with horseradish sauce and cheese. They'd fall on the kitchen floor grappling and rolling, punching and biting, scratching and screaming.

The perfect stranger, who all this time had been under the misapprehension that he or she was there for an entirely different sort of sandwich, would begin to inch backwards toward the door. Sometimes they'd forget the stranger was even there. Other times one of them would look up from the fight and say, "You. Don't move. We aren't finished with you yet."

The perfect stranger ran from the apartment sometimes when this happened.

Eventually, his vintage Ramones T-shirt would be ripped, her black tube sheath would be scrunched down around her waist leaving her bare-breasted and both of them covered in bruises, bites and Dijon mustard. She’d have him pinned to the floor and attack him with a kiss.

We're so wonderfully, wonderfully pretty, they would say, licking each other's faces and chests. And if the perfect stranger, by any chance, were still there, they'd both turn hungry opal eyes in that direction.