Hives of the heart

It comes when the small scratchy seedling of love begins to inch its thistley littleness into the echoey chambers of your gray hollow heart. It takes root, fed by the thready pulse of hopeful. It flowers, brambley with bated breath. And so it's pulled, abrupt, with callused fingers, by the same fickle hand that sowed the seed. In those hours you lie awake, scratching, those hours alone with your itching skin and unringing phone, you tease out the splinters and examine each one. Maybe it happened in an instant, a storm on no one's radar, a flash flood you couldn't have foreseen. Maybe it crept slowly, a winter descending, a graduation into frost. But all you have now is an itch where it once grew, a rash where it lefts its thorny remnants in your pulpiest of places. A rash where you expected love. Hives of the heart.

But you move on. Why not move on? You have everything in the world going for you. You're a pretty girl, smart, slightly funny. You will be fine. You will meet someone else who will appreciate you for you, who will keep their hands and horticulture off of where they don't belong. So you meet your friends for drinks, get a new haircut. You extend your metaphors until you feel appropriately smug with melodrama. And you can start looking again: why not? Your heart's not broken, not even aching. It just itches. It itches. You scratch almost constantly. But that never hurt anyone, no one that you know. It itches, but whoever died of hives?


My name is Tache and this is my blog, even though blogs might be for dorks. I am part white-collar professional and part wild animal. I am still kinda young and still kinda pretty, but not too much of either. You can reach me at hivesoftheheart@gmailcom.