Love is infinite.
Love is eternal.
To me, these phrases sounded farfetched,
a romanticization to make couples feel good.
Then my girlfriend thrifted a new purse,
a bag of thick leather shaped strikingly
like a genuine human heart.
I’m no stranger to strangeness,
so I thought little of it
until Valentine’s Day.
On that once wonderful
now horrid holiday,
I committed my gravest sin.
In what I believed a cute gesture,
I unzipped the heart-shaped purse,
where I wished to hide her surprise gift.
Inside, I saw it –
the reddest red,
an infinite void through which I heard
a faint throbbing.
Through impossibility itself,
my mind followed that ear-rupturing sound.
After what could only have been years,
I found that which produced the throbbing.
It was . . . another heart-shaped purse
identical to the previous!
Naturally, I opened it.
What else was I going to do?
Inside, I witnessed greater enlightenment,
a redness redder than the reddest red.
From somewhere deep in this new abyss,
the throbbing persisted much more loudly
yet still so unfathomably far away.
The sheer shock of this discovery drove
my mind from the realm of the purse.
Though I experienced but a glimpse,
I learned much, much more of the truth
than any man was ever meant to.
Albeit after significant therapy,
I proposed to my girlfriend.
We are now happily married,
though I must confess that I
sometimes consider heeding
the call of the heart-shaped purse.
Nate Ritchie is a horror fiction writer, journalist, and poet from southwestern Ohio. His poetry has most recently been published in Exquisite Death, Life in Limbo, and FLARE Magazine. When he isn’t busy writing, he can be found roaming the wilderness or playing with his rambunctious pet rabbit Bunnicula. He believes there is no better experience than reading a poem and feeling as if the author has just burned down the whole neighborhood.