There was a time when Elias believed love was made of sunshine and apple blossoms. His mother used to say hearts were like orchards: beautiful if tended to, but wild and unkind if left alone. He never truly understood her words—until he met Mara.
She had a quiet kind of beauty, the kind that didn’t ask for attention but received it anyway. Mara smiled like she was apologizing to the world, laughed as though joy was borrowed. Elias was drawn to her sadness before he ever noticed her smile.
They met in spring. She sat under the oldest tree in the orchard his family owned, sketching something in a worn journal. He approached with cautious curiosity.
“Apple trees aren’t in bloom yet,” he said.
Mara looked up. “That’s not why I’m here.”
He wanted to ask why she was, but something in her eyes—gray like winter water—held the kind of pain that begged not to be touched. So instead, he offered silence, and she accepted it. For days, then weeks, Mara came to the orchard. She drew. He worked. They didn’t speak much, but a strange comfort grew between them, like moss on stone.
Then came summer, and with it, the beginning of something soft and dangerous. One afternoon, Elias brought her a freshly picked apple, the first of the season. She bit into it, juice running down her wrist, and said, “This… tastes like trust.”
He laughed. “You talk like poems.”
“You listen like one,” she whispered.
They kissed that day, under the shade of the tree she always sat beneath. His heart, unused to being seen, fluttered wildly. For the first time, he believed he had something beautiful that was his to keep.
But love, Mara once said, is not always kind.
She began to change as the season waned. Her smiles grew tighter, her eyes heavier. She stopped sketching, started flinching. Elias noticed the way she touched her chest sometimes, as if trying to hold herself together.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked one evening.
“Of being loved,” she replied. “Because love leaves holes.”
He didn't understand then. He thought he could fix her sadness, stitch the wounds with time. He didn’t know that some hearts aren’t waiting to be healed—they’ve made peace with bleeding.
Autumn fell hard and fast. One morning, Mara didn’t come. Nor the next day, nor the one after. He searched the town, asked in the small art shop she frequented. No one had seen her.
Three weeks later, she returned to the orchard. She looked thinner, like sorrow had eaten away at her edges.
“I thought you left,” Elias said, his voice breaking.
“I did,” she answered. “But I didn’t mean to.”
He reached for her, but she stepped back.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “And it will hurt.”
He braced himself, but nothing prepared him for her truth.
“I was never whole when I met you,” she said. “I thought I could be, with you. But love isn’t a bandage. It’s another nail.”
She handed him her journal. Inside were sketches of hearts—hundreds of them. Each one pierced with nails, screws, broken glass. And in the middle of the last page, a heart that looked eerily like an apple—split and bleeding.
“I’ve given my heart to people who only wanted to break it,” she said, tears falling. “Each one left something in me. A sharp piece. You… you’re the kindest wound I’ve ever had, but you’re a wound all the same.”
“Mara, I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know. But I’m too full of pain. There’s no room left for love.”
She left then. No goodbye, no promise. Just silence—and the sound of something soft inside Elias tearing apart.
He returned to the orchard every day after that. Worked harder. Spoke less. Sometimes he’d sit under the old tree, journal in hand, reading her sketches like scripture. He began to understand her pain—not just feel it, but wear it.
Winter arrived. The trees stood bare, like grieving statues. One night, Elias wandered out into the orchard with a hammer and a box of nails. He picked the brightest apple from the old tree—the one she had loved—and drove a nail through it.
“Pain leaves something behind,” he whispered. “Let this be yours.”
One nail became two, then three. He didn’t stop until the apple was a crown of iron. It bled juice like a wound too deep to close.
Elias left it on the tree.
Each season, the apple remained—rotting slowly, never falling. Visitors to the orchard would stop and stare. Some called it art. Some called it madness. But no one knew it was a heart: hers and his, tangled in grief, rusted and red.
Years passed. Elias aged with quiet ache. He never married, never left the orchard. People said he was strange. But in truth, he had simply learned the language of silence Mara once spoke.
And every winter, he’d return to that tree, kneel beneath the pierced apple, and whisper:
“Some hearts don’t break. They bleed"
