Heart

Her heart hurt and came crumbling like a falling star. It began as a shooting star and it tumbled into bits of ashes and rock, and fell on the Earth disheveled and twisted. It was ugly and torn and it was ashamed to call itself a star at all. It was picked up and moved around the world, it saw things humans can only dream of. It saw the moon, it visited the sun, and it knew what was waiting for us in the sky. And even though it saw these incredible things, and went to these places, it was left to rot in the mud. And after a time, erosion slowly wore it away farther and farther, until only a tiny piece remained. The aorta still left behind, a symbol of the branch that held it together in the first place. And out of it grew flowers and light shined upon those flowers with a candescent kind of beauty. And when those flowers slowly made their trip hope, and withered to carbon and nutrients in the soil, they gave birth to life, and so grew a fantastic willow tree. Its leaves blew in the wind, and birds and insects made life there. And it became a stronghold of beauty and wonder to the botanist who studied it. It saw life too, the couple who sat under it, the animals who grew from its splendor, the cities built around it. It watched so much life go by and it stood so strong, so contently seeing these lives of others. It filled the aorta with a kind of spirit, and ashes collected that had died, and pieces of the heart reformed under the tree. One day a flood came, and flooded the soil and choked the roots and the heart. It nearly burst, but then the sun came and took some of the water away, and the heart breathed a deep gasp, like that of a child who had been crying. And the heart felt stronger, imprinted with scars and stretch marks from the water. And in a moment of strength and love for the life it had seen, the tree took pity on the misshapen heart, and tormented and twisted itself. The roots suddenly became arms and legs, from the cork arose flesh, from the xylem flowed a river of blood and the phloem donated its nutrients; from the leaves grew hair and nails, and the seeds donated a face so compelling, so beautiful, that the being would forever stand in the sun so that no water could touch it; and the cuticle became the beings forcefield to erosion, pain, and loss. The flowers which gave rise to the tree of life, borne a new girl, one of flesh and blood of the memories and the feelings it captured from all of its transitions. She was beautiful for her power, her strength, and for the scars she bore across her body, from the fire and the water and the Earth, she soared back into the sky through the layers of the atmosphere and took her rightful place once again among the stars.