The Key to a Heart

One young woman's life told in the form of a fairytale

The Key to a Heart Once upon a time there was a poor family that lived in a far away land called Washington. The father was a worker for a cheap pub far away from home. Every day he would travel a great distance to work ten hours. At home he left two children, a boy of six years and a girl of five, and their mother, a beautiful but tired woman. She was with child, which was not expected. It was midsummer and the heat was nearly unbearable.  An old friend of the family had come to visit. She had no children but did have a warm heart. The mother was overjoyed to see her friend, whom she had known since she was a teenager.    

 They spent the day playing with the children and reminiciscing about old times. All throughout the day the mother had pain, a pain which was growing every moment. And even though it was three weeks too soon, it occurred to the mother that the baby might be coming. When the father returned home after another grueling day at work, they set out in the carriage to see the midwife. It was a long and bumpy ride and the mother layed in the cart moaning in pain.   

  They finally reached the small cottage of the midwife and they placed the mother on a bed made of hay. The midwife quickly determined that the baby was coming and the mother would have to stay the night. For thirteen hours the woman layed there in agony, before it was time for the baby to be delivered. It took another three hours and numerous potions to finally deliver the baby.    

 And then there was a baby girl, covered in blood. Oddly, the child was not crying...in fact, the odd looking creature wasn’t really making any noise. Then suddenly the midwife realized that the baby was not breathing properly. She held the child up, examined it, and fearfully told the mother and father that the child might very likely die. The baby was kept away from the parents in a separate room where the midwife poked and prodded her and fed her every potion she could think of to try and save the girl. Late that night the mother came in, near hysteria, and desperate to hold her child if only this one time. The midwife finally conceded, handing the baby over to the mother. And then something miraculous happened: the child completely relaxed, her breathing slowly became normal, and it nuzzled against its mother.   

  This baby who nearly died grew into a little girl with a headful of curls and big brown eyes. The family named her El which meant cheerful. The big brother and big sister adored her for the first few years and gave her everything her little heart desired. For the first five years of El's life she lived a carefree life, full of stories and love. The little girl had a talented imagination and could create entire worlds inside her head.     She would play in these imaginary worlds for hours, out in the rain. For El, the rain was more magical than any doll, dress, or animal. And she was happy with this; happy in the warm cottage that was her home. That was until El’s parents sent her on a mission more treacherous than Red Riding Hood’s or Hansel and Gretel’s. She was sent to....school. This was a fabled place that her brother and sister had talked about, but El had never seen.     

But she bravely went, dreaming about the books she might get to read. School broke the little girl’s comfortable world and exposed her to the unfairness of life. The other children could be mean, but more often they would simply ignore her. El’s schoolmaster was a cross woman who falsely believed El to be daft. The little girl was a timid thing around the woman and she would often come across as a mute. Luckily, in her next year of schooling, a new schoolmaster came to teach. She was a young woman, beautiful and as sweet as honey. El blossomed like a little rose, under the warmth and love of her new teacher.     

Life was most uneventful until El's eighth summer. Her papa had become a pilot on a newfangled contraption that he called an “aero plane”. But he had to travel hundreds of miles to fly these machines, and he would often be gone for months at a time. And so El’s parents decided to make the treacherous and long journey across the country to a foreign land called ‘Ohio’. Late that summer the family Shaw packed up their large wagon, their horse and cat, all their belongings, and headed east. It was hot and the crops were tall when they arrived. It was flat and very hot that time of year.     The next year when El turned nine, she went to an apprenticeship for children. There she was supposed to learn how to row a boat, how to fire an arrow, how to ride a horse and everything else most children were expected to know and love. But El was not like other children, and she missed her family a great deal. The stars had handed her the cards of a Cancer, and she was uncomfortable being away from the comforts of home.     

During the first two years in this strange new land, El met a young lad who was only a few months older than her. To her, he was a fairy, a sprite. He was magic incarnated. The two children were nearly inseparable in these early years. They would create worlds of magic in the woods, on the road, everywhere they went.     While the little brown eyed girl clung more and more to her friend, she distanced herself from the other village children. El found them simple, vain and mean. In her 10th year, she chose to not attend school with the other children. Instead she stayed home with her mother. Home was warm and comfortable, but it was if time had come on swift wings and stolen El’s youth. She acted like an old crone, a hermit, determined to shut the world out and live in those old worlds of her youth. But this was easier said than done. Her father returned in October from a trip to the far away seas and brought back a little spirit. At first the spirit was a delight for El, the friend she had never had before. He didn’t speak her language, he was funny and lively. But as time wore on, and he began to learn English, the relationship detoriated.   

  During the time that her family had moved to their new home and settled in, El had discovered theatrical performances, and fell in love with performing the work of masters and artists. It was a love/hate relationship, as many of the other village children had old families in Ohio, and family roots went deep in this strange land. And no matter how charming or pretty El might have been who she knew mattered more.    

 Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, El never much cared about popularity or knowing the right people, and so searching for roles on the stage was more difficult than cutting down magic bean stalks. Sadly, while her love of theater blossomed like the magical rose in Beauty and the Beast, she was also as fragile as that rose. El became slowly more and more withered and cynical on the inside, and her personality became as ugly as the Beast’s.    

 She left her fellow youth again to stay home with her mother, and while she continued to thrive in school, her social skills failed. And no magic but her own was going to fix that. As the days passed, and her heart hardened, the girl began to disappear. It started with her heart, then her hands, then her feet. El became more and more invisible, fading into the background. After a while, only her family could see her. The mother searched desperately for a cure, but had no success. All the cures were meant to reach the girl’s heart, but now not even the mother could see it. Around the time that El reached 14 years, pieces of her began to appear again. Her face, then her stomach, and eventually her hands. While her heart remained locked away, hidden from the world, El became visible to the world again. She apprenticed with a theater and found friends. She was successful in her school, and she traveled to far off places with her family.Who knows what the girl might have been if things had continued like that,undisrupted. Seers alone can know. 

The boy that El had befriended all those years ago had a dark magic growing in him that they had all been unaware of. He had a demon inside of him that was hidden deep behind the friendly façade, and it had attacked someone close to the girl. The demon had used another, and it had taken 3 years for the soul to finally escape the demon long enough to tell the truth.And the world fell into shadows, this uncovered demon sucking all color from El’s life. Cobwebs grew and dust fell, as the rest of the world remained ignorant and blind to the monster inside the young man. Few people believed El or her family,and the girl began to disappear rapidly this time. Her heart retreated even more and then began to poison El’s body. Hate and anger consumed the girl, and it seemed as if the whole world had turned against her. All the while the demon who was once her friend was allowed to roam free, and her whole household fell into disarray. 

 For over a year, all you could of the young woman was the top of her head and her elbow. The color slowly came back to her life, and she began to reappear, but now her body was covered with scars so deep it seemed they would never heal. During her last year of schooling, El functioned like a robot. She was mechanical, focusing on her work and looking up at the stars to her future. In midwinter she suddenly befriended a female fire spirit, a girl who was the first person to truly understand the invisible girl. El’s new friend understood her and loved her, and it made all the difference those last months in the dry and barren land of Ohio.

 Throughout the summer El traveled across oceans to visit the isles of Ireland, to the tropics of Florida, the far off land of New Mexico, and to her long lost home land Washington. In September El traveled south to California to join a group of vagabonds, musicians and artists to travel to the mystic land of India. They spent 10 weeks in this foreign place, and an incredible miracle began to occur: El’s heart became visible. It was perhaps the first time anyone but her mother and her friend had seen it since El was thirteen. Not only did it appear, it grew, and pulsed. From her heart flowed music and love and light.

 El was no longer the invisible girl. Color burst everywhere and her body sparkled with a new light. One night during the long trip,El sat on the hillside in the Himalayas, watching the birds swoop overhead, crooning to her. As she looked up at the sky, she felt something hard and cold drop into her hand. El looked down at her hand and found a small key with a piece of paper tied to it. The paper said: dark times may blind you and others from your heart. This key is your own awareness and creativity, and this alone will allow you to unlock your heart in those times. The young woman, that baby who nearly died and the girl who was once invisible, still has that key. She keeps it close to her heart, as she prepares to take another journey. But this one is yet to be written, and only time will tell where El’s heart will take her.