Look, it's simple: Fall in love with everyone you meet, including - especially - yourself.

The last time Roland had given his heart to another he dropped it on the sidewalk, where it flopped about like a gasping fish, waiting for someone to pick it up. Nobody did. They just stood there, him and her and the squick, squick squick of a dying love heaving grotesquely on the gravel, both parties studiously ignoring its throes. Minutes passed like eternities.

She broke first - coughed into her hand, cracking the silence like a gunshot. Begrudgingly, he picked the heart up in his right hand, dusted it off on his overcoat. Grimacing at its state, he shook her left hand with his and walked abruptly away, letting the thump, thump thump mark his pace.

They can't all be epic tales.

I may not live forever. I don't want to save the world.
I'm not real sure how this whole tale should end.
But I know a few things about purpose and prose,
and I'll know more when the last word is penned.

Listen: Love's got wings, and hope's the thing with feathers.
And when the two beat together, they'll lift you back up again.

1. The Forest

The ground cracked, the sky fell in, the world ended, and the forest remained. Eternity was its nature, and like all things eternal it had no endings or beginnings but only events, happenings, moments in time. In one of these moments a vast empire had stood, and now it stood no more. Beneath crawling vines and deep layers of earth the forest reclaimed the gleaming city, a thousand years passing as its ruins sunk beneath verdant green eager to erase its existence. Once the city, too, had been thought eternal. Now it was ephemeral. No lips had spoken its name in centuries.

Nonetheless, something had changed since the breaking. Wrapped in the tallest of mountains erupting from the deepest of valleys, the forest had nonetheless seen life, and the story of it remained. As the remnants of the world rebuilt, it was spoken of not as a thing untouchable, but as a thing that had been touched, a place once known and again knowable. It was sought for by the dreamers: as a quests end, as a new beginning, as a home and a hope and a promise of eternity. It was paradise.

Leonard hated it.

2. Leonard

Leonard Dupont lived with his parents in a quaint brick manor – two stories, and a library underneath – in the middle of a pond located just a short distance from the forests center. He despised the house, the pond, the forest, the cliffs that bordered it, the local fauna, the food, his parents, and on some rare occasions, himself. He was sixteen.

Leonard was tall, gangly, thin and pale. He had coarse dark hair that was impossible to comb and sharp grey eyes that perfectly complemented his invariable grimace. He burned like fine rice paper in the sunlight, of which there was always plenty, and stuck mostly to the shade of trees, of which there was always more. On most sunny days he stayed inside the house entirely, but since the weather never changed, the days were always sunny, and lacking a better excuse he would frequently be forced out of the house against his own will.

On occasions such as this he would typically bide his time by throwing large rocks at the fish and glaring viciously at the other local fauna, which was friendly, herbivorous and sickeningly cute without fail. If his exile from the manor was of a lengthier time, he would swim the pond and venture out into the woods alone. There was no set destination in mind on these ventures; the forest was strangely resistant to trailblazing. For months Leonard had tried to mark the routes that he had used, but carvings he made in trees vanished within days, and other markings no matter how clever or subtle seemed to be swallowed up by the underbrush overnight. He had often speculated (and correctly, it turns out) that you could lose a city in this place, and he had to be careful It hardly mattered; though it was easy to be lost in the forest it was just as easy to find the only two destinations of note: his house, which was located where the trees were thickest, and the hundred-foot cliffs that he could reach by walking any other direction.

These were beautiful, in their own way. Majestic outcroppings of stone lined with thick vines and creepers that glistened in the light, they appealed to Leonard in more ways than one – but in all his sixteen years he had never managed to climb them. Once one made it halfway the vines dropped off and the stones sloped forwards like a cresting wave, forcing the climber to topple backwards if he dared to proceed. He'd fallen once, and though the brush had broken his fall, it had been such a violent and troublesome experience that he no longer had the heart to try. They were walls to his prison – but things that were left here stayed where they were put, and so Leonard came here to enjoy the one thing that he didn't hate about living in the forest, which was the books.

Where everything else about the manor was designed with a certain elegance in mind, the cellar had only one purpose, and that was to hold as many books as possible. It extended far beyond the confines of the manor itself, its walls composed of the same peculiar variety of stone that made up the cliffside of the forest – thick walls that never cracked or buckled or sought any form of repair, and which glowed dimly in the dark, defining passages and doorways. Each of these divided the cellar into some thirty-odd rooms, each one of which was divided again by two dozen shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling with thousands upon thousands of books.

The library was older than the house itself, and its contents contained the work and dreams of entire civilizations. He did not know who had collected them all but he was eternally grateful for their existence, as they described for him worlds far outside the scope of his tiny house on his tiny island in his tiny forest in its tiny crater. They showed him what the world outside was like, and he could not, for anything, hate it as he did everything else in his life.

Leonard read everything, he could get his hands on: histories, guidebooks, biographies, educational texts on every subject conceivable, philosophy and alchemy and mathematics. There were fictions, too, hundreds upon hundreds of fantastical tales: stories of stars that came alive and danced for mortals on moonlit nights, of beasts of terrible power and beauty and the heroes that came to fight them, of love that spanned the ages and broke all barriers.

Mostly, though, he read about wizards. Leonard was fascinated with wizards; he had been ever since the first day one had come to his house and set fire to his mothers rosebush.

Sometimes it's about feeling
before you were ever thinking. Lady, let's ionize the atmosphere
with your breath against mine. I think I'm ready. I think
you're not. I'm wrong on both counts, and it doesn't matter in the slightest.
I once didn't believe in these things,
and when I tell you I'm certain now it's because I'm not sure. And that feels
agonizing
overwhelming
terrifying
and beautiful.
And you are so beautiful.

I wish I could write my thoughts down on little postcards, keep a diary of
when I love you and when I don't. Thinking of you... and the last time we kissed. Thinking of you... and wondering why
you shied away from that glance. Thinking of you... loving me unconditionally
even though you never did. Thinking of you with your hair over your sleeping eyes, your head on my arm, my hand tingling. Thinking of you...
Thinking of you...
Thinking of you...

Love is
consensual non-consent.
It's a choice to be stupid and crazy and powerless
it's a decision to be caught off-guard by your beauty
it's sheer willpower just to understand things the way that you do.
When I open my heart
I close my mind – just a little – to the possibility that you are not
perfect in every way, that those little foibles don't
make you amazing and wonderful and unique, that your choice is not
mine, and that I will always, always, always,
never choose you.

My heart's in the right place. My head will follow.
Sometimes kicking and screaming.

One whispered vow can shape a life. One decision on a sleepless night.
Two hearts can meet if they care to try - now, or then, or never. No guarantees. No telling why.

What are these moments that we truly live? That we seek, and find elusive?
That we stumble over in error
only to learn that we can fly?
One moment, every day. At least one that I could make my own and live
not as I am. But will it come? I cannot say.

I do not fear it. But I am who I am
and I will not apologize. No epiphany could make me less
of a mad devil, surviving
a hopeless romantic, waiting
a believer in truths, seeking

these are lives that I lived. My past.
And whether present or future, a part of me.

So know this:

I'll tread new ground and old. I'll be brave and I'll be bold. My heart will break and swell.

And I'll have a story to tell.

I was always a broken heart.

I've heard it said a man is gene, meme, scene:
what happened to him, what he knows, what he is
but I did not understand
that one is the same as the other
that I am the cause as well as the effect.

I knew.
I learned the dark romantic
from those who would share light,
felt meaning and found memories of that
which was most important to me – that
wretched, wrenching, writhing, ready soul
who believes so much and fights so hard
for a poem and a song
and nothing to show for it.
I understood the story before I told it.
And I knew where it would end.

I brought myself to this. Again and again.
Knowing the kiss goodnight would save me
and believing you better off.
Knowing the right words at the wrong time.
Knowing why you had to leave.
Knowing love with a phantom specter, a mirror darkly,
a fairy story girl
who knew me – how could she not! - for what I am.

And I am a broken heart. A cautionary tale for the cautious.
A warning for the vivid and vivacious - for those who feel love
without any hope or sense, and yet flinch from the brink
as they tumble over it.
Desperate souls starving to feel without thinking, think without feeling.
Gamblers playing for their lives with empty palms outstretched.
I could have tried a thousand ways
to love you, and it could have ended a thousand ways, all of them
just
like
this.

So smile, as I do. Let the meaning fade – I'll keep it company
a while longer.
Say, enough! For it was always this.
No stroke of destiny, but no pretend,
no faking what I feel - just feeling it to the end.

I was always a broken heart
struggling to mend.