When I was five, I painted a picture of a heart. It was the first thing I’d ever made. My family wasn’t an artistic one – we didn’t have crayons, white paper you could leave your mark on. I played with blocks and Barbie dolls, but Plasticine left stains on white furniture, markers might be used on thousand dollar painted walls and heaven forbid I leave a smear of paint on my mother’s Burberry bathrobe, no. Art is messy and my family was precise, careful. In kindergarten I entered a magical world, a world of noise and mess, of feelings. People cried, they screamed, they laughed and played games with no rules and finger painting on Friday afternoons was just another learning opportunity. I was proud of the heart – bright red on white paper, flecks of paint around it that might have looked a mess to someone else, but me were part of the art, part of the beauty of it all. I brought it home to my mother and she asked me why. I put it in the recycling, and there were no pictures on white paper on our perfect silver fridge.
When I was thirteen I learned how to draw a heart in the shape of someone’s name. You would carefully, gently trace a heart in pencil; then plan out the letters of their name so they matched the contours of the heart. You would go over the letters in pen or marker, and then gently erase the guiding strokes so only the perfect shape was left, like magic, on the ruled paper I was supposed to be taking notes on. I did it first with the name of a boy. He was fourteen, one grade ahead, and I only ever saw him in the cafeteria at lunch. We exchanged seventeen words over the course of three months, and somehow I thought I could love him even though we’d never truly met. I drew his name in colours, in rainbow scales, in sparkles. I drew two hearts and linked them, his name and mine. And even after he laughed when Jenny fell down the stairs and I decided I could never love a man like that, the hearts stayed mine. I drew my own name, my best friends’, even the characters in my favourite movies. I felt creative, like this little sketch was proof that I had spirit.
When I was twenty my mother gave me a solid gold heart necklace. It hung at an angle, so the heart could be tilted to the left or to the right. I told her I hated hearts – that they were cheesy, that they didn’t mean anything; and how could she know so little about me, that she wouldn’t know that? For years I’d scoffed at them, scorned those who adorned their clothes with them; like a little embroidered heart was the root of all my malaise. The truth was I’d stopped believing in the kind of love that I felt hearts represented; that lofty ideal, that children’s fantasy. I had an anatomically correct heart tattooed over mine, wore high-necked dresses and bathing suit wraps to hide it from my parents’ disapproving eyes. This was reality, I told myself, as if I knew everything there was to know about the world. This is life, with the illusion stripped away.
When I was twenty-nine I looked out my window and saw sixty-three of my friends and acquaintances standing in the shape of a heart. My fiancé had asked them all to wear red and pink, and arranged them just before noon in the quad between the buildings where I worked as a financial analyst. He stood in their centre and declared his love, and the heart started twirling, dancing into a circle, into a square. Beautiful, simplistic choreography. My coworkers laugh and rolled their eyes and asked how embarrassed I was, and I laughed and groaned and agreed that he was such a ham, that I couldn’t believe it, that it was the worst proposal ever; but in my heart I felt something thaw.
When I was thirty-three my daughter went to preschool. She was so excited, in her cute little boots and her brand new coat. She talked the whole way there about the friends that she would make and all the things that I told her she would get to do; the toys she would play with, the books she would make. After I dropped her off I sat inside my car and cried for an hour, feeling an empty space in my arms where she had been. When I came back that afternoon to pick her up, she ran into my arms with a white flag waving from her hand. “Mommy mommy!” She cried. “Look what I made!” I praised her skill, gushed over the beautiful lines, the perfect colours. I told her how proud I was, how hard it was to draw – a perfect heart.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.