There was a time when her heart was resolute, ambitious, unguarded, eager to love, to hope, to dream. It beat with the innocent conviction that anything still might be possible. But life has a way of asking for just a little, and then a little more, until even the most generous heart learns how to retreat with time. Her heart had never shattered. It had simply diminished. Softly, steadily, until she no longer noticed how much she had given away.
She had not spoken of it, not aloud, not even to herself. The stillness within her had grown too familiar, too soft around the edges to be called pain. But it was pain, all the same. A quiet kind, the sort that wears a person down until even longing feels distant.
And so she knelt before the boy god, his form sculpted in devotion, his bow forever drawn, unmoved by time or pleading. She did not come for love. She came for the wound. For the beautiful, brutal mercy of feeling something again.
If it must ache, let it ache magnificently.
Let it ruin her with grace.
There was no promise in marble, no mercy in the boy god’s eyes. But still, she offered herself to the silence, because to ask was to believe, however faintly, that something might awaken. Not love nor peace. But perhaps the exquisite violence of being moved.
She knew the arrow, if it ever came, would not save her. It would not soften her world, or return what had long since been lost. But it would stir the hollow place in her chest that had forgotten how to ache.
And for that— for the fracture, the tremor, the ache that proves a heart still beats— she would kneel a thousand times more.
