They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

What is bad for the heart is good for art.

I'm in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I've been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private.

Love does as it undoes. It goes after with equal tenacity: joy and heartbreak. Her happiness was his unhappiness and that's the unfair way it was.

My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier. Because I imagined it.