“C’mon, you won’t fall,” Ricky grinned at my look of doubt, then held out a hand, “I won’t let you fall. I promise. I want to show you something, Daisy.”
For just a moment, I hesitated, staring at him. The setting sun poured orange, liquid light onto us. Ricky’s hair was turned from dark and bronzy to coppery colored curls spinning waywardly off his head, it made me want to run my fingers through his hair and hug him tight even in the hot, humid July heat. I reached forward and took his hand, letting him lead me down the rocks on the side of the road to the concrete tunnel underneath the red railroad bridge.
I had to admit I’d follow Ricky almost anywhere. Only three months after Ricky moved back to town, we’d just clicked perfectly. Ricky fit into my life, fit into my group of friends-in fact everyone loved him-and fit into my heart. It seemed only natural that we start to date. Now we’d been going out over a year, and for the first time I was really sure I was in love. Or as in love as a seventeen year old could be, but in my heart I knew that it could grow.
“Are you sure this bridge won’t fall on top of us?” I asked, only half joking.
Ricky chuckled, “It won’t. You’re a silly girl, Daisy,” he flashed a teasing, breathtaking smile back at me. I wrinkle my nose at him as he helped me off the last of the steep, gravely hill and onto flat, moist ground covered in clovers, the charred remains of a bonfire and shards of broken glass from beer cans and broken car windows. Still holding my hand he led me into the tunnel, illuminated with golden light.
The tunnel was covered in vile phrases, blaring colors that popped out and blended together at the same time. I didn’t stop to read what the tangle of words said, but looked at Ricky, letting the sunlight bleach out the graffiti. In just seconds Ricky had pulled me to a place where the scrawling phrases had thinned out.
“Ricky, what…”
Ricky suddenly stopped, pulling me to him and wrapping his arms around my waist.
“What do you think?” He asked playfully, the grin that was surely on his face echoed in his voice.
My lips were paused in mid-sentence, my eyes on the milky white-gray expanse that was, until recently, bare. Now there were two, five-foot long hearts in a deep cobalt blue coloring the concrete wall. Our names were written below.
“This is illegal,” I mumbled.
“Yeah… I thought this would be more fun that on a tree,” he smiled into my hair, swings me softly back and forth in anticipation.
It was extremely childish, completely cliché, immature, unneeded……
A smile broke out on my lips, and I turned to look at him, “I love it.”
I took his jaw gently, beckoningly in my hands and pulled his face down for a kiss. When I started to pull away after a short kiss on the mouth, he caught me in his arms and kissed me softly, breathlessly as the sun burned right behind us.
After a minute he just held me close to him, so the button of his shirt gets tangled in my hair and I can smell the Axe cologne he wears. Getting up on my tip-toes, I glanced over his shoulder, eyeing the illegal act of artistry he’d done in my honor…our honor.
“Why are we blue?” I looked up at him, not standing as close as before, but still I kept him next to me. I never wanted him to go.
He laughed, clasped his hands behind my back, “I dunno… I mean…” he took a breath, then looked straight into my eyes, “Girls like Brittany and Rhonda want pink hearts. And pink is… flimsy,” he shrugged, looking away for a moment, almost embarrassed. I smiled at him, then tweaked his nose and gave him a knowing look when he turned back to me and continued, “But blue is solid… it’s for a long time... forever. We get blue hearts.”
I smiled into his shoulder, feeling tears come to my eyes. He’d always known how to do that, make me feel like my heart was about to explode, like I could start sobbing and hysterically laughing at the same time. He’d never wanted Brittany, the bottle blonde, or Rhonda with her vixen-like curves or Spanish features.
“I love you,” I’d managed through my tears, looking up at him as the sun, burning its brightest before it was snuffed out on the horizon, blinded me and my smile wavered with tears. Though Ricky had told me he’d loved me before, it was the first time I’d said it to him. He’d let out a startled, happy laugh. Then with shaking hands he’d taken my face and kissed me, letting me know he loved me too. Letting me know he wanted me forever.





*****
After that July day, blue hearts became our “thing”. It wasn’t that it made any sense, or had a story behind it other than Ricky randomly spray-painting them onto a wall. Before that night, blue hearts had meant nothing. After that night, they meant everything. I’d found a blue heart icon to sign the end of all my texts to him, he’s bought me a necklace with a turquoise heart hanging from the chain. Blue hearts were a symbol of forever.
Forever had been a daydream for us, for me. If it had only been that he had stopped wanting me, moved on, I might have been able to accept it. At least then he would have been alive and on this earth, happy even if it wasn’t with me. I would have been suffered in silence if he’d smiled on another, but eventually I could have been happy. Now I don’t know what I’ll ever feel.
Kneeling on the highway, the cold wind forever around me, I’ve gone numb. I force myself to move, picking up my arm and shaking the can of spray paint in my hand, feeling as the rattling breaks into the frigid howling of the night.

The night he died was full of the first falling leaves. The cherry red stems broke off, twirled through the cinnamon scented air with abandon and settled beneath our feet with an unfortunate finality.
Ricky smiled as he stepped off the front porch, crispy leaves beneath his feet. He groaned with a chuckle as I grabbed his hand to keep him from going off into the dark. As I did, I heard the clock from the next town over as it droned twelve times. He’d stayed over later than usual after having dinner with my family.
“You’re parents expect you to go right back inside,” he reminded me, wrapping me in a hug that left me still shorter than him though I stood on a step and he on the sidewalk. I nuzzled deeper into him, I felt just right in his arms.
“Hm,” I mumbled into him. How could it be that I missed him before he was even gone? Even as I hugged him. It wasn’t that I minded him leaving tonight; it was thinking of how he would leave in a couple of months for college. But I knew I couldn’t be selfish and hold him here with me forever, he was already missing the first semester partially because of me, partially because he had been helping his dad at the hardware shop since Mr. McCaskell’s leg had been crushed at the beginning of summer.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?” he kissed my hair, loosened his arms from around me.
I nodded, giving him one last squeeze before I let go.
As I slipped into bed that night, going so peacefully, so happily to sleep, how could I have known that he was dying? That my world was suddenly gone? Those hours of ignorance that night were my last hours of peace.
It was 2 A.M. when my phone rang. Groggily, I’d reached out, searching for the noise. When I’d seen Mr. McCaskell’s number, I’d sat up quickly. Hadn’t Ricky already made it home? Hadn’t he left hours ago?
“Hello?” I asked, concerned. I liked Ricky’s dad, he’d always let me sit behind the counter of the hardware store while Ricky worked, he’d barbequed for us dozens of times, and had all the seasons of M*A*S*H ready to force on Ricky and me whenever we went into his house.
“Daisy… Oh God, Daisy I….” his voice was horse, and broken, I could hear through his shaking breath tears. Immediately, my chest constricted. I’d known somewhere deep inside of me …that there was a blank, black hole in my heart. My lips went dry and I couldn’t speak, my entire body felt suddenly numb.
“Daisy…Ricky, he’s…. he was driving on the bridge and another car.. it hit him,” he was trying so hard not to sob and scream and fall apart between each word. He said more, but I couldn’t hear him. Trembling all over I made it out of bed, not sure of where I was going, and stumbling in the darkness as I gasped for breath.
“No, no, no…” I whispered, moaned, trembled as I moved forward. I don’t know what I knocked over, but it shattered by my feet. I fell, my phone sliding into the darkness.
I sobbed, not knowing what to say so I moaned and retched and choked on my own tears as I searched for my phone, but found myself unable to move from where I was curled up on the floor.
“Daisy, Daisy, what’s wrong?” I heard my mom as she pushed sharply against the door. She was in her orange paisley print robe, her brown hair tangled and messy around her, her eyes wide in confusion and concern. She stepped over the broken glass and found my phone from the beam of hallway light.
Her face went white, her eyes horrified. She sank down on the floor next to me, whispering things into the phone as I fell apart. When she hung up, she pulled me into her lap.
That whole night I’d wanted her there and I hadn’t at the same time. I’d pull her to me, cling to her out of desperation, pushed her away because in those moments I’d ached so bad, Id felt so empty that I needed him. Ricky was the only I could hold onto and not feel like someone was ripping my heart apart, but I couldn’t. It was a cruel joke that I needed him so badly now and I could never have him again, and for that I hated humanity. I hated the fact that I was still living. I’d curled up, smacked my mother’s hand away when she tried to touch me, screamed through my sobs that I didn’t want her there. Half the time she had listened to me, leaving me alone as I wanted, in the corner wishing that reality would disappear. In those hours I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to think. Because all I could think about was his smile, his last words to me, his last breathe… And then my chest would feel like it had collapsed again and my sobs had ratted my body until all I could do was moan and scream and wrap my arms as tightly as I could around myself, trying to hold myself together to keep form feeling the broken and empty pain cracking my heart in two.
When the sun rose, Mom was sitting on the floor, leaning on my bed, asleep looking tired and ashen. The glass was no longer between us on the floor. Dawn was the most horrible thing I had ever experienced. I wanted to live in the dark, to live in the night where I never had to see a living face again.












*****
As the sun rose, I do one last thing. I walk down the side of the rode, all alone down those rocks I had once been afraid to go down, and sit down in the dirt where thousands of clovers had once grown. The brown dirt was bare, no longer green and lush hiding the cigarette butts and beer bottle caps. Dirty glints of glass are hidden in the soil. Some of this glass could be his.
Out of my pocket I take a glinting silver chain, a blue heart dangling at the end. The present Ricky gave me that summer. I burry my fingers into the earth, feeling the chain sink with them, feeling some of the slivers of glass slash into my fingers.
Purple-gray light is coming from behind me, and birds chirp loudly in the silence of morning. I hear the first car go by above me. The depth of night is no longer here. As the sun rises higher I sit perfectly still in this position, my legs curled beneath me, my fingers in the dirt, my gaze turned towards the train tracks. Just as the light becomes bright enough to see slight, faded shapes of graffiti down the tunnel, I stand up, letting the chain slip from my fingers and remain in the ground, then walk back home.

The empty, flat fields are now colored a dusty golden. The weeds and plants crumble beneath my feet as I close my eyes to the wonderful, warm sun.
“Daisy!” I open my eyes when I hear my mom’s scream. She runs off the front porch, screen door slamming behind her.
“Why did you do that? You’re father just woke up and you were…you were gone,” she holds onto me tightly as we walk into the kitchen. She is still in her cotton T-shirt and sweat pants, the same orange paisley robe thrown on over them. Dad strained and worried, stands in the doorway. It’s a strange sight, seeing him so early. The pale stubble is usually gone by the time I see him, and he looks older. I notice the wrinkles between his eyebrows, the gray streaking his hair.
“Daisy, we were worried. Where were you?” he said sternly, desperately as mom sinks into a chair at the crème colored kitchen table.
“When he found you gone…and woke me up…we thought…” Mom sniffles, biting her lip and grasping my hands as I sit next to her at the kitchen table.
I set the empty can of blue spray paint on the floor next to me. Dad glances at it, then back at me. I know that they thought I’d gone to throw myself off the bridge that Ricky had died on. In fact, that’s probably where dad was about to go. I notice that his boots have been jerked on and left untied, a button up flannel shirt is thrown haphazardly over his cotton T-shirt and the keys to his Ford are still in his hands.
There were times when I felt like just killing myself. I almost did a couple of times, though my parents don’t know it. Something saved me. Maybe it was from all those Sundays I spent in church, maybe it was how Ricky hated his mom’s selfish act of leaving the world of people who loved her behind for her own sake, maybe it was the thought of a future I’d have someday, and future that didn’t end in blood and death and pain. But my parents didn’t need to worry about that anymore.
“I’m sorry. There was something I had to do,” I whisper. But I sound stronger. I sound more like me, which makes me smile for half a second.
This shocks my parents, and they glance at each other, and then back at me. They finally both nod understandingly and look as if they wished they knew what to say. It’s a look I’ve seen many time over the last four months. But now I feel like it might be ok if they never find just the right words to say that will piece me back together. Because I’ve finally taken action.




*****
No one ever said anything about the row of blue hearts that were lined along the concrete barrier over the bridge. Or the words, “Remember Ricky” behind them. It’s not that this was a lot, or some grand, spectacular gesture to Ricky’s memory. But it’s what I needed to do.
That morning, after I had been out all night and came back with the sun rise, the first snow began to fall, blotting out the scars left on the road. As I watched the snow fall, I, for just a second, forgot the past, and stepped out under the falling frost. Then I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, letting the pure, perfect flakes cover me as I smiled facing the sky.

Years have passed, and that seventeen year old love that was smothered and crushed is no longer my focus, though it haunts me with a heart-wrenching beauty sometimes.
I have a husband now, who I love more than life itself. He built up love in me, I’ve built a life with him, and we’ve had three children that fill my life like fire flies fill the sky on hot summer nights .For taking care of me, helping me heal, and giving me my dreams of love and children, I know Ricky would have loved him.
When we visit home, my husband knows to take my two boys, neither yet in second grade, and my hazel-eyed baby girl with him and let me have some alone time. I’ll walk through a lush field of barely, over the two lane highway veined with cracks and oozing tar, then walk down a hill of rocks to the tunnel underneath the railroad tracks.
Though the hearts are somewhat covered by a new generation of graffiti, they are still shockingly visible. I trace the shapes with my fingertips; feel the slight ache that has long ago healed. I can’t say I haven’t wondered how things would be if Ricky hadn’t died. But I can honestly say I wouldn’t want the past to change, because I am happy with the life God has given me. This is the future that kept me holding on.
So why, do you ask, would I come back to this place? Why would I let the raw emotion of a teenage girl awaken once again, even if only for a few minutes?
Because even now I can feel that love, a love that was so strong at such a young age. So few are loved enough in life and I cherish the memory that I was blessed with Ricky. It startles me to feel the emotion still ebbing through the outlines Ricky so long ago shaped out on that indifferent, chilly wall. All the beauty of our relationship is right there, imprinted amongst cuss words and the gang signs. All the pieces of Ricky will live forever right there beneath the train tracks, still alive in two blue hearts.