Day after day, the girl pasted pieces of her heart into the brown paper journal. She loved the time she spent with her heart and her journal, baring it all to the lined pages. She played with the rubber cement she applied, pulling off fingerprint after fingerprint. She smoothed down the edges of the bits of her tender heart she placed so gingerly onto the severed trees.

Every now and then, she’d go back and look at the parts of her soul strewn across the pages, smiling at a past thought, frowning at a past demon. All in all, you were written within the pages of this journal and that’s what made her happy.

Something was amiss today, as she came down for breakfast and sat sullenly at the table. The book she always had by her side (as if her imaginary friend was trapped within) was not there. She answered none of our questions; she parried our interrogations rather well with her silence.

And later in the day, as the sky grew pink with its snowy potential, we sat on the front porch smoking cigars and talking in hushed voices as to not disturb her. She sat in the corner of the yard with her once-treasured papers, weeping over the heartache contained within her human heart. The pages apparently no longer meant anything to her.

I nudged my neighbor and we watched her set the journal afire with a single match. The wind whispered loudly, nearly extinguishing the match, but Fate was intertwined with my little girl that day as the inner pages suddenly caught fire and burned quickly. She sobbed and sobbed at her heart blowing away as ashes on the cold breeze. The thicker paper cover was slower to light and still remained when all of the insides had burned into the atmosphere.

She spoke words of wisdom to us (far beyond her years) as she brushed by with only the cover left: “This paper shell is all that remains of my heart; the insides are nothing but ash.”

She dropped it at our feet and sulked inside to sleep again.

It would be years before my angel drew near to the One who could restore her heart.