Heart Strings

It was only a string, an eight inch strand of leather.

I watched her as she navigated the throngs of kids milling through the hallway. I had been looking for her all day. Her eyes never left mine as she crossed over to me, her smile bright and infectious. She was practically running as she neared.

I barely knew her. She was the friend of a friend. We had only just met on Friday night, but I had not stopped thinking of her since. It hadn’t really been a party, just a gathering, but I found a slow song on the radio so we could dance, rocking slowly to some undoubtedly great George Strait song. While we danced, she cried... it was the song, she said.

Me? I couldn’t even breathe. I simply waited, amazed that someone like her would run through a crowded hallway to get to someone like me. “Hold out your hand,” she said as she approached. I did as instructed. I could not stop staring. Her eyes were so bright, so alive, so sure! I had never seen eyes shine like that before. She tied the thin strand of leather around my ring finger. “I made it for you in Home Economics. Now you are mine.”

That said she walked away, but she did look back. When she did, from over her shoulder, I saw it! It was right there for the briefest instant, right down below her surface smile! Finally I saw the crack of something familiar through the lipstick and the eye-liner. It wasn’t just me, after all! She had it, too! She hid it well, but it was there, lying underneath. I saw the doubt hidden inside there! The fear! I saw the shy girl with the brave face wanting to be loved, needing to be accepted. I saw someone just like me behind her mask, and I knew it was that “hidden her” whose trust I wanted to win. I felt a need to protect that “insecure her” that she had walled up inside her. I could be her “safe place”.

That is all over now. She and I grew up, and apart. School years fly with their pageants, parades and proms. I lost her to the years, and years later I lost that leather ring. It survived our time together though, as we helped each other through life’s most difficult days. Through those years she brought or bought me many richer and sweeter gifts, but nothing she gave me ever meant so much as that sliver of leather she knotted to my finger in a sophmore hallway, and in so doing tied around my heart forever. It was only a small token of youthful love, but it gazed up at me from that finger as she had when she first tied it on me, like a lioness staring into my insecure teenaged soul until it whispered back,

“Yes... now I am yours.”