The Understanding Heart

Break ups now are so virtual. There was a time when I would have sat in my bedroom, around me a scatter of torn photographs, the white pulpy interior fleshy like the weight in my heart. The glossy image wafer thin as the lies he, whichever one he was, had told. The 'printed on Kodak paper' backing all turned upwards as I bound together the broken memories.

But today I sit in a cafe, prodding angrily at pixellated images, on Facebook, on Instagram, in my photo album. Delete. Delete. Delete. Secure delete trash. And yet somewhere in the operating system there will be backups, at some point the images will have been shared. In a year, there will be a 'memory' on my social network and you, yes, you, will reappear.

I pick up the uneven scraps of chemical paper from my bedroom floor, gathering them into a bundle held together with tightly cupped hands as if carrying my own blood. I flick my elbow on the door handle to open it, looking down to the floor to make sure I had dropped nothing. In the garden I carefully place the paper into the brazier, making sure nothing slips between the gaps, the white bright against the rusted brown and black metal.

I slam the phone down on the thick wooden table, as if the sudden motion might permanently delete all of the memories. The man behind the counter looks up and smiles, as if he knows exactly what I am doing. He turns away but flicks the back of his hair with a finger or two to draw my attention to him.

The boy next door watches from the window as I symbolically run a match along the length of the strip of sandpaper on the side of the matchbox. I hold it in front of me, burning tip down and diagonal to the ground, to make sure the length of the wooden shaft catches. I like to feel the heat of the flame against my fingers, and then when I can bear it no longer, I drop the match into the paper pyre and watch it catch. The boy in the window has seen me do this before and knows what it means.

The man behind the counter still has his back to me. His arms work methodically, with gentle hisses and clatters, the sounds of hot coffee and cold china. I pick up the warm phone and watch the bar work its way across the screen until the message 'All Photos Deleted' appears. For a moment I want to find any that have been shared, for one more look, but I don't. I turn off the phone and watch as the glowing screen darkens.

All that is left of the photographs is a mound of burnt, charcoal black, curled chemical paper, the ghostly images floating in the smoke into the sky. I smell the fire on my skin and on my clothes; it will take days to wash off. Where will the particles land? What becomes of the memories we lose? As I turn back to the house, I see a single torn photograph on the grass and I pick it up.

I am miles away. A loud noise in front of me, on the table, reawakens my attention. I open my eyes. The man smiles and nods down to the fresh cup of coffee he has just placed in from of me. 'On the house'. He walks away but turns once to look back and smile. He knows my order. I warm my hands on the cup, and feel the extreme heat burn my skin.

That afternoon, the boy next door rings my bell and presents me with a small bouquet of flowers. I've seen over his fence and I know he has picked them from his own garden. They are loose, without string or paper to bind them. I carefully carry them to the kitchen, place them on the worktop, reach into the lower cupboard for the small vase, fill it with water and tease the flowers into the narrow stem. Then I place it in my window. He does this every time I burn my photographs.