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Hearts

By Brittany Eden

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PROLOGUE


Seven years ago


I WONDER WHAT LIGHT drew me beyond my window and onto the roof.
Maybe it was the moon, a great light shining hope in the night.
Because maybe, stars weren’t enough for a withdrawn girl. But that great night light illuminated my darkness and brought moments of freedom. There, I found someone. I even caught glimpses of myself—my true self—on the moonlit nights.
Mostly though, I think it was the stars that started it.
“What do you think heaven is like?” my friend asked, hidden in the shadows.
I shivered in my nightgown, which clung in the humid late-night air. “You’re asking the wrong question.”
I drew my knees up against the late summer chill, feeling hints of freedom from the fog crowding my mind, there in midnight darkness under the wide expanse of the heavens.
Beneath innumerable stars, the city slumbered softly while in the forest beyond the townhouse backyards hummed a nightingale, defying the blare of a passing ambulance siren. It was calm on the rooftop where I spent summer nights keeping vigil against sleeplessness. I could deny the past all I wanted, until I slept. I was too afraid to confront my trauma and desperate to protect myself from what might have been reality or may have been delusions. But there was no hiding in the subconscious, and it didn’t seem possible for my young mind to process.
Night-terrors are scary.
“And what would that be?” he asked, lounging like he owned the roof of the shed belonging to the townhouse beside mine, which nearly touched the second story roof I sat on.
I bit my lip. “Where is heaven?” I stared at the crescent moon, glad my unnamed companion shared my affinity for secrecy and mystery. “Where can we find it?”
“Would we know it if we saw it?” His words echoed the longing in my heart, because all I ever wanted was to see a glimpse of heaven. Peace, like the settling of night after a long day. Joy, for endings and beginnings. Love.
I took a deep breath of the cooling night air. “Heaven is endless light making clouds glow with gold-rimmed fire over an ageless sea beyond the stars.” Leaves rustled on nearby trees. “Heaven is where hills are split by a happy river whose destination is forever.”
“You’re just describing the sunset,” he scoffed. “That’s cheating.”
“Maybe the sunset is the start of heaven,” I huffed, hurt. “Maybe sunsets lead the way there every night, and God keeps sending them to remind us to keep looking.”
“You’re just obsessed with sunsets because you hate summer at home so much you want it to end.” Hurt laced his voice as it nailed at sharp angles the thing inside I tried to cover, but I swallowed my own cutting reply because I couldn’t bear to hurt the one person who’d kept me company on this rooftop for each lonely birthday these last hard years.
Was he right? Was my desire to hide wrong? No amount of whimsical questions had led me to reveal my truth to him; no, I hid that memory so deep, it no longer felt real. The past was a dream, and I had relegated it to my nightmares. If it stayed there, it couldn’t haunt me during the day.
But part of me wanted more, to be more than that memory had forced me to become, and all my self-preservation never banished the thought. There is more. Just like the sunset was a daily reminder to remember, and surely all remembering wasn’t monstrous. The sunset, pulling its rays through the clouds and playing its last strains to the sky long after disappearing. Such steadfast resistance to nature, such futility in the face of another tomorrow. And right then on the rooftop, between me and the boy, darkness had already fallen. It all started five summers ago on my seventh birthday, and none of us were the same since.
How could the heart survive?

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