The Birth of Heartbreak

It happened while I was flipping through the pages of my fourth year Latin classics book. That was when I glimpsed the word that brought me back to my childhood days with Didi. I rummaged through the book again, frantically trying to locate the page that had the word on it. I flipped through the pages once. Twice. Three times, this time with my nose inches from the yellowed pages of the old text.

Aha. There it is.

I stared at the four-lettered word, reading it in my mind. Then I read the entire sentence.

Aut neca aut necare.

            I was eleven when I first met Didi. She transferred to our fifth grade class in May, which was strange. Most things about her were. She wasn’t popular, which I always found surprising. Her hair was so long, she could sit on it if she ever let it down. And it was darker than the darkness trapped underneath your blanket. She had the most peculiar eyes. I remember thinking they didn’t fit her thin face; they looked so much older than her eleven years. Most days they were the color of the deepest oceans, and other days they were the stormy clouds that loomed above it. I swear, the first time I saw lightning, it was in Didi’s eyes.

            We took to each other instantly. It was odd, the way I felt my soul cling to hers. I never felt lonely before Didi, but after Didi, that was all I felt.

            It was a hot and sticky Friday afternoon, so Didi decided that we should spend our time down by the river that my mother told me to never go near. We were still in our school clothes and my pockets were heavy with the two juice boxes I stole from the cabinet in the kitchen. When we got to the river, Didi picked a spot and I waited patiently for her to cast the “invisibility spells” around us.  “That way grown ups won’t find us, ever,” she’d say.

            Satisfied with her work, she sat on an amputated tree trunk and motioned for me to sit next to her. I handed her a juice box and sat down on the grassy patch at her feet. “Didi, how come we never go to your house?” I asked as I poked my straw into the top of my juice box. She didn’t answer me at first, so I turned to look at her. Strom clouds stared back at me.

            “I told you not to ask me that again.”

            Fear grabbed hold of my insides and my mouth dried up. “What did I tell you the last time you asked?” she asked in that quiet way of hers.

            “Th-that you wouldn’t be my friend again.”

            “That’s right. I ought to push you into this river right now!”

            I looked away from her and fixed my gaze on the juice box in my lap. “I’m sorry, Didi. I won’t ask you again. I promise.”

            “You know what happens when you break a promise?” she threatened.

            “Yes,” I mumbled.

            “Good.”

            Even though I wasn’t looking at her, I knew she was running her fingers through her hair. I pulled at the grass around my legs. After a few minutes of silence, she spoke.

            “Do you want to hear a story?”

            I tilted my head back to look at her. The storm clouds had broken, giving way to the ocean currents. Feeling a bit easier, I grinned. “Yes.”

            “Good. Turn around and face me.”

            I did as I was told and watched as Didi put down her juice box, and tied back her long hair.

            “This one my great great great grandmother told me,” she began.

A long, long time ago, when the world was still young, there lived a beautiful woman in the middle of the forest in a far, far away place, where there were no other humans. She made friends with the birds, and the trees. She could even speak to the river. And she was happy.

            Then one day, a man got lost and ended up passing through her forest. So the woman hid and watched the man through the eyes of the sparrows, and she learned his actions through the dirt he walked on. She had never seen a man before, but she knew that whatever souls were made of, his and hers were the same. And so, she instantly fell in love.

            She followed him around the forest, staying hidden the entire time, and the further his footsteps lead him away from her, the more her entire being ached for him, until she could bear it no more. Her heart leapt each time he smiled in day dream. Wanting to be the cause of such a beautiful smile, she did a foolish thing that would haunt her until the end of time.

Gathering up her courage, she approached this stranger and began confessing her love to him. The man’s eyes rounded in fear, and he took several steps backward, almost stumbling in the process. The woman, needing to hear a similar confession from his lips, followed him. The man put a hand out and shouted some words in a foreign language. She stopped in her tracks and stared at him, not understanding his words, and not wanting to understand his energy. She felt his fear, his repulsion.

With another string of foreign words, the man got up and ran. She watched him leave. And that was the first time heart break had touched a woman.

She couldn’t go on. Every time she walked through her forest, she felt the lingering presence of the stranger. Her heart clenched when she passed the tree he had rested against. She was no longer living, and yet she wasn’t dead. The constant state of hovering between two realms and the sleeplessness that came with it drove her to the brink of insanity.

And so one night under a moonless sky, she sharpened her thinnest bone-dagger and inserted it between her ribs. She carefully cut out the treacherous organ, until it lay on the grass, still beating. She asked the Earth to swallow it up, burying it in the deepest recesses of the underground.

The woman had become a demon, a beautiful, heartless demon. She never was the same again, and she haunted the world for the rest of eternity. She was heart break. She became that pretty girl you fell in love with at a party, but never returned your phone calls. She became that girl that kissed you once, and then disappeared, leaving you crippled. She became that great girl next door that moved after she became your best friend. She became the girl you courted all throughout college that ended up marrying your best friend.

She fed on the hearts of men. She never died, she just moved on. Once she had one man’s heart, she took it and moved onto the next meal.

Didi’s eyes were alive by the time she had finished the story. It sounded more like a nightmare to me. I stared into the distance, feeling my skin crawl.

“You better watch out,” she said with a smile that broke me. “She could come for you, too.”

“How do I stop her?”

Didi tossed her head back in a laugh. “It’s nearly impossible to stop her!”

I shivered.

“But I’ll tell you how.”

            I dared to meet her eyes. “How?”

            The legend states that heartbreak is made of two halves of two different souls. Two souls that were ripped in half for the same reason. If one of the halves of the two half-souls belonged to the woman, who did the other half-soul belong to?

That same night, the man that was lost in the forest finally found his way back to his village, where he found that his sweet heart had assumed he was dead and carried on without him. Feeling his heart tearing apart, he went back to the forest and ripped the organ from his chest and offered it to the Earth. Caliming the two half-souls as its own, heart break was born. The male demon roamed the Earth, a hollow man. He fed on the hearts of young women. He became that shy boy from your English class that laughed about your glasses behind your back. He became every man that ever ignored you. He became every man that returned your shy smile with a sneer. He became every man that made you feel fat, or ugly, or stupid.

And the only way to get rid of both these demons is to reunite their hearts, deep within the Earth.

*     *     *

            I stared at the sentence again. 

Aut neca aut necare. 

            Kill before you are killed. 
            Bile collided with the back of my throat as the realization dawned upon me. Didi’s full name was Dimidium Neca.

Latin for half death.