"Hey, are you okay?"
He looked at her, alarmed. His hands gripped his table like it was a lifeline, while his feet prepared to scoot him away.
"Not really." She sighed into her hands. "Oh my God. I'm so so sorry. I don't think I can tell you what I've done. Again."
"Well, maybe if you spit it out, you'll feel better. That's usually what happens."
Her eyes, overflowing with guilty tears, flitted up momentarily.
"I let it fall again. It had gone through enough, but I wasn't careful. I'm so stupid it serves me right to have it shatter into pieces."
The corners of his mouth were curling up into the beginning of a smile. "If it's that ancient correction tape again, I've already told you I don't mind fixing it no matter how many times you break it."
"That you said about my correction tape." She nodded slowly. "But not about my heart."
"That's definitely worse, I should say. But you'll be over it eventually, or isn't that what you always tell me?" He recalled his own lovesick period, the time she nursed him back to health, and brought about a tender yet bittersweet ache in his heart.
"I suppose." She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. "I think this one's going to last a while though."
Seeing as he could do no more for her, he held out his hand as cheerfully as he could. "Well, give the correction tape to me, at least. I'll see what I can do."
She placed the broken pieces of the poor thing in his hand, and he worked his magic silently, occasionally asking for her help. In ten minutes, he was testing it out.
"There, see? All fine now." He leaned over and shoved the small object into the gap her cupped hands made.
He expected her to thank him profusely, as she always did, but she only lamented, "If there were only a correction tape for love that we may cover all of our mistakes in white."
He sighed, letting his own ink blemishes seep to the surface. "If only."
She smiled wistfully. "If there were, you'd probably be the only one in the entire world who could fix it."
They both laughed at that, but in doing so, he missed the sad look she shot him through her tears of happiness and sorrow.
YOU ARE READING
martyrdom
Poetrylittle trinkets that hit you right on that spot in your heart, the one that you thought was closed off, but is actually the source of what? of e...
