Heart and Lungs

I breathe in deeply, the crisp outdoor air hitting the back of my throat, startling and abrasive - an insult. Winter is coming. Frost has been forming on the tips of grass for the last few days, ruining the last of the edible plants.

A memory of my father finds me now. Back when houses had light, when air could be heated by machines, he would chastise me for wanting everything warm.

Put on a sweater.

I sit up, throwing the few blankets I have into a backpack and zipping it closed. I’m in a girl’s bed today. The room is nice enough - I believe it belonged to a preteen. Painted almost entirely pink, stuffed animals litter the floor along with sparkly toys. Posters of a boy band I had never listened to hang haphazardly, clinging to the walls, as if they’re still trying to hold onto a sliver of the old world.

Soft, dawn light filters through a broken window. Torn and tattered curtains blow softly. If time were still relevant in this world, I would guess it to be around five or six in the morning.

He used to wake up around now - he would kiss my hair, whispering something familiar, something I can’t clearly recall right now.

I shove down a feeling of regret. I can’t go back - remembering those words…memories of the old world. Clinging to those memories is as senseless as fangirling over a preteen boy band.

I rip the poster of the grinning boys down as I leave the room. If I can’t cling to the old world - neither can they.

I wish everything didn’t look the same.

I thought plants would take over backyards, becoming wild and unruly. I thought that trees would become monstrous and beast-like, turning the city into a jungle. I wish it was different - maybe every corner wouldn’t spark a memory, every house a reminder of what I’ve lost.

I let my right hand follow the contours of a car’s hood, my left gripping a knife I stole when everything began. The car is covered in rust, each window smashed and shattered, the tires resembling a collapsed lung.

I walk past the small book shop where I met him. The books inside are probably caked in dust, pages yellowing and spines stiffening. He brought me books about cooking and wine; I always reached for the true crime.

You’ll wear it, right?

My mind flashes back to my birthday - the day before the end of the world began.

He had grinned at me, his eyes beyond bright. In his hands he held a necklace, sentimentally heart-shaped. A declaration of love, a promise of belonging. My stomach had flipped looking at it, my palms turning sweaty and my brow furrowing together. Some animalistic, instinctive part of me wanted to run, wanted to sprint until my legs couldn’t carry me anymore.

But he had held up a necklace - completely naive to my inner workings, totally oblivious to my panic. To him, he was offering an unashamed life of companionship, of beauty and support. To me… he wanted to crush me - suffocate me.

You’ll wear it, right?

I shut my eyes now, trying to stop the memory from flowing, trying to leave the picture of that last day as it was, as I force it to be.

I open my eyes. The sunrise is beautiful this morning, all pinks and oranges blushing the fluffy, rolling clouds. To the west, I can see the fading night - every single star visible and perfect. I would trade every single beautiful star to go back to how it used to be.

But there is only this world. Survival. My traps have worked well - I haven't starved yet. Learning to make them had been the biggest challenge, the local hunting store bountiful in supplies to help me, everyone gone too quickly to even compete for their use. I had spent my nights those first few weeks crying - my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, my lungs unable to steady enough to draw one full breath. It had been so quiet, the orchestral hum of human life abruptly ended by an unforgiving conductor.

I learned how to hunt. Rabbits and squirrels became a meat I was used to eating. I took a small comfort now in turning their bodies over a bed of hot coals.

Sometimes, as I stared at the body of my latest meal, my eyes would glaze over and I would see my own body being slowly flipped over the heat. Motionless, but as cyclic as the unending, grueling days.

He would tell me I still had a purpose.

But he was always the optimistic one. He was the one that believed in love, believed in the romance novels, the happily ever after. I had been the one who was cynical; sarcastic and selfish.

When the plague came and took every single person, I wondered why it didn’t take me too. It was the day after my birthday when my own mother got sick. The day after I told the boy I didn’t love him that everyone began to die.

My parents died within days of each other - coughing until their lungs gave out on them. Within weeks, everyone else was gone too.

Since then, I’d walked this path every single day - getting closer and closer to his house each time. The center of the city was worse than the outskirts for a few reasons, but mostly because of the eyes.

People had fallen where they stood, the plague taking them within hours. Hospitals overflowed, and morgues were overwhelmed. So now bodies littered the streets like flies on a windowsill in winter - just as meaningless.

I tried to go see him sooner - but the eyes of the dead followed me where I walked, even as their decaying forms became food for the birds. They haunted me, whispering my undeniable guilt.

I couldn’t say I blamed them.

A few months ago, I had made it all the way to his doorstep before the murmurs of the dead caught up to me and warded me away. A beast of guilt clawed its way from the deep part of my stomach into my chest every time I thought about visiting him.

He would have forgiven me for not coming sooner - he would have told me it was okay to survive.

But winter is coming and the animals will be hibernating, the plants dying. The frost caked my fingertips and eyelashes when I woke up today. Putting on a sweater won’t save me now.

I stepped around a body, it’s hair the only identifiable thing left. I’ve become so used to seeing them now, a sight that might have made me recoil a year ago now only draws from me a feeling of jealousy. I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be dead with everyone else.

He wouldn’t have wanted me to. But perhaps more than that… dying would be too easy.

So today was the day. I’d hidden from him for long enough. I glanced up at the sky. His house is across the city, but I’ve got all day.

I gripped the knife in my hand. I took sharp breath of the newborn winter’s air, savouring the scent of cleanliness. I began to march.

“You’ll wear it, right?”

I bite my lip. His eyes are so kind, so full of hope. He wants me to love it, this heart-shaped, girlish thing. He wants me to see how he feels about me every time I look in the mirror.

“You hate it.” Those perfect eyes sink - and it snags something in my heart I didn’t know was even there.

I sigh through my nose. I told him not to get me anything. I told him it wasn’t a good idea.

I didn’t hate it. I couldn’t hate the thing, the necklace. It was an object, it was a thing that had no life or death. It was simple. It was beautiful and pure.

I hated what it meant. I wouldn’t belong to myself anymore, I would be lost in him, in his definition of who I was. He is so good, I don’t deserve him, I’ll ruin him. I wouldn’t be myself, my independence lost; but worse…what if I wasn’t capable of loving him back?

I can’t look him in the eyes. Not as I murmur, “You should return it.”

His house looks exactly the same as it did on my birthday. Maybe he didn’t have time to take down the decorations, or perhaps he had left them up in case I came back. That was the kind of thing he would do. Either way, Happy Birthday is spelled out across the window sill and exhaled balloons litter the floor. If I were to open the fridge, I would find a rotten cake in it, my name spelled out across the icing with an enthusiasm I don’t deserve. Colourful careful sprinkles are too happy for me, for who I am.

You should return it.

I walk up the stairs, past the room where we opened presents he had spent time buying for me, past the room where we played games. I pressed my hand into the doorframe of the room where he had kissed me for the first time.

That unknown thing in my heart trembles.

Maybe this is where I can end it. Maybe this is the room I was meant to find all along, some sort of personal hell just for me, meant to drag out my torture until I found the thing I ruined - until I saw the body of the one who had only wanted to love me. And I hadn’t let him.

And maybe… maybe when I see it, I can finally rest.

I’ve done nothing since the world fell apart but survive and think about him. Think about what I would do differently, if I could do it again. He wanted to love me - he wanted to invite me into a world that wasn’t just about survival, wasn’t just about myself. He wanted me to love him - to be simple and beautiful and good with him.

You should return it.

I chose myself.

And to even the score… the world sneered - and gave me exactly what I demanded: a world where I only had to think about myself.

So as I round the corner into his bedroom, I steady what is left of my soul. I focus on that wobbling, snagged thing in my heart that I didn’t know was possible, that I didn’t know existed, and I tear it down.

But the shell of the boy I love isn’t in his room. He isn’t on his blue bed.

The only thing on his bed is the necklace. Just a necklace, golden and pure. A hopeful heart. A wish, a question.

You’ll wear it, right?