Is That Love? (The Hedgehog’s Dilemma Pt. 4)
The girl lay in the puddle.
He had left long ago, left her here. But his words remained. His words rang in her ears, echoes of words that built on themselves and drowned out the words that she remembered.
“He said he loved me before,” she though. “He said he cared. He meant those words, he had to have.”
But these words he had left with her, these words couldn’t have come from Love. Love doesn’t carry a knife.
“From a wounded heart, perhaps? I am wounded, I have said words that could hurt,” she thought.
But we are all wounded, and yet there is still love.
“But he was hurt, I could see it in his eyes-”
We all hurt, and yet there is still love.
“But… H-He said…”
Words.
Words spoken from love.
Words spoken from pain.
They are all just words.
—
The hedgehog’s wounds are always fresh in the morning when he awakes, the cost of a little extra warmth, a little extra comfort. But any show of affection costs him. A hug, a kiss, or just the nearness of another brings him pain. Old wounds run anew, old hurts well up again. He never imagined his heart would weigh this much, he never imagined he would ask himself if it was worth it. Those old songs of never trusting again, the poems of never going back, just letting it all go, they were just words. Words spoken from a heart hurt by love.
But they were just words.
The hedgehog gets up and gingerly licks his wounds. He counts them, old scars, new scars. But as he counts them, he’s not troubled by the numbers he himself bears. There are names to each of them, events, faces, words, like labels under picture frames or tags on murder weapons.
No, what clouds his mind and grips his heart is the number he has left on others.
—
The girl got up from the puddle, choking back a tear that shook her frame as it crossed the dessert of her cheek to her chin. The words still ring in her ears, but the face is cloudy. The name doesn’t quite match the phrase.
There was a pair of lips that said “I love you.” They belonged to a boy without a face and name. No, he had a name. She just didn’t know it yet.
But the lips that muttered that other phrase, the phrase that had laid her low, cut her deep, driven her away, those lips… were the same?
The same heart? The same tongue? The same pain from the same love?
“But Love doesn’t carry knives, Love doesn’t destroy. Love is patient. Love is kind.”
Love is hard.
“Is it so hard?” She sobbed.
“Is that Love?”
—
The hedgehog limps along. Occasionally he stops and looks back over his shoulder. Somewhere back there are others hurting like him, and others hurting because of him.
As he licks his wounds again that night, he thinks, “If only I could tend to theirs, if only I could help them heal.” But his tongue is a quill to any wound but his own, and it only heals with more punctures and stabs.
“Am I doomed to be alone then?” he wonders. “Are we all destined to trade pain for warmth, pain for kindness?”
“Is that Love?”
—
The young girl heard love and pain, but saw that they came from the same heart.
The hedgehog felt his own wounds, but saw those carried by others; he found them to be a cruel currency.
“Is that Love?” they asked.
—
Love and pain are not strangers. One is the thing we wish for, and the other is the price we pay.
“And so I write at the conclusion:
Love isn’t made.
Love doesn’t sell or trade.
But we buy and sell our love away.”
John Foreman
