I brushed his hand away. I looked to the other people on the bus. The women with their children, old men with their leering eyes, the driver who glances back in the rear view-none of them caught my heart in their throats. A little girl choked on it, coughed and spit it out into her hand, stuck it under the bus seat in front of her. And that is where my heart remains, cushioned in bubble gum and cigarette ash. My heart is lonely at night when the bus is parked in cold, dark parking lots. My heart watches strangers-waits for someone to run their finger under the seat to press their gum somewhere and find my heart there, peel it off and raise it to their mouth to kiss it. For now it remains where the girl has left it. I get off the bus, leaving behind the little girl, the man with wandering eyes and hands and my heart stuck under the seat.
My sister waits for me on the back step-she is pulling the hair of her ink stained doll. She is making long braids of the bleached, plastic strands and lying them beside her on the cement step. She’ll leave them there later, when she jumps up to do something new and will forget about them. The cat will chew on them and we will find yellow hairballs on the furniture for weeks. My little sister is singing-the words sound like the things mom says, but musical and sweet. She is singing about headaches and laundry and bags of sour milk left in the fridge. Mum is at the other end of the yard, laying evergreen boughs over her decaying garden plots. She is wearing one of Dad’s old wool sweaters and a pair of black rubber boots. She doesn’t see me, so I slip inside, past my sister, quickly so that i trick my heart into skipping a beat. I hold my breath until I am safely alone in my room, and I close my door. I then reach under my bed and pull out a shoebox. It is full of letters. They are all from people who once claimed they loved me. I compare them. They all love me for the same reasons, although most of these reasons are never explained. All of the people who wrote these letters have tied themselves to me at some point in time, and I’ve drawn them all towards my heart, embraced them for a few glorious moments and released them like butterflies-watching them flutter off towards the sun. I separate them and at the same time they all represent the same thing to me. I remember them for the unique way in which they loved me. One of them lay with me in fields and read books about faeries, another cried into my heart until it was soggy turning my insides into a lake of sorrow. The latest rolled back and forth over the body until I was unrecognizable. Each one of these letters have marked my heart, like a map marked with pins for all the places you have travelled. It resembles a throbbing pin cushion...lonely, throbbing and stuck under a bus seat...
