My first love broke my heart. It wasn’t just broken, it was in smithereens. Scattered around my chest, floating like snow in a shaken snow globe. My rib cage struggled to hold it together. That day I put a firm lock on that cage. I could not put the smithereens back together, but I could hold them in, stop them from disappearing altogether.
Months later I got lyrics from Interpol’s The New tattooed across my back. “I wish I could live free. I hope that’s not beyond me.” I feared attachment so greatly I burned my commitment to avoid it into my flesh. Attachment meant loss. Not just of love and potential of that love, but of friends, of a social circle and a routine that was so much a part of me it felt like part of my body. It soared through me on the waves of my blood.
Attachment was the enemy. It must be avoided or conquered at all costs. Chemistry is not what loss was made of. Loss was made of conversations, moments, future plans. Not in goosebumps, a halted breath, a furtive look, or a lingering touch. Fingertips brushed the outside of my cage. The bars were caressed, but the lock was left alone. The key hidden somewhere not even I could find it.
I relished in what could never be. In that relish I sometimes lost sight of the loss I could cause somebody else. Those somebodies were completely disconnected from me. Their attachment was not part of my world, or at least not a part I cared to visit. I spent years letting somebody who held other people’s keys caress the bars of my cage. Never pausing to consider the smithereens I could leave in my wake, at least not for long enough to do something about it.
There were a few for whom I found the key again. I kept it close in case they wanted it. But these people did not want it. They liked that the cage was locked firm. They liked that because theirs were locked too. Their own smithereens held in.
I would wear the key round my neck, hoping that the glint of it would catch their eye. On a sunny day spent lying just inside a garden door, on a wooden floor that held the heat of a tropical beach. On a grey morning, his arm finding that place on my waist where it fit like its own lock and key. In a crowded bar on my birthday, my key suspended over the flickering light of the candles on the cake he held in his outstretched arms. Surely then he would see it and tell me he wanted it. To open my cage and keep the contents safe. But he never did.
After that I hid the key again. Attachment was painful, but so was thinking you might want it again, only to find you were alone in that want. I did not allow myself to think about my cage. I focused on other areas instead. How could I use my mind to find fulfilment? How could I strengthen the muscles in my limbs? How could I nourish the parts of me that kept me alive? The parts that didn’t hurt.
But as the years passed, curiosity crept in. What did the contents of my cage look like now? Were they still floating untethered inside my chest? They didn’t feel like smithereens anymore. Nor like a beating whole. They were something in between. I peeked between the bars to see.
When I got my tattoo, I deliberately omitted the next line. “Settling down it takes time.” But as I peeked between the bars, I saw that the smithereens were slowly finding their way back to one another. Left undisturbed the snow in the snow globe was settling.
I found the key again. I turned it in the lock and opened the cage. I leave it open all the time now. Someday my settling smithereens might see something that looks like them, as sunlight glints on someone else’s open cage. I could be offered that someone’s key. And they mine. Together we could watch through the open doors as the smithereens become hearts again.