She flicked the card lazily down to the ground.  It landed face-up.  Two of hearts.

The pack was flung into the air, one hand covering her eyes and the other blindly reaching for a card.  She opened her eyes and they stared out blankly.  Two of hearts.

Gathering all of the cards once more, she flipped them, backs to the floor and bellies revealed.  Two of hearts.

Inside was the dull beat of her other self, whispering furtively in her mind.  “You can’t just rip me out,” it stroked.  “We’re the two of hearts.”  I spat.

The two hearts don’t always beat in perfect rhythm.  Sometimes the smaller will pulse faster, struggling to manipulate the pondering larger.  Other times the real will swallow up the imaginary beat and become all the stronger.  But something is always wrong unless they beat together.  Thoughts thicken, steps stumble, words worry themselves to come out.  A whole with a growth attached never regains its perfect balance.

They beat together as she shuffled the cards.  Her wallpaper buzzed with hearts in pairs.  She squinted at the sun which suddenly multiplied to two.  Was her world like this, or were they changing it for themselves?  Two of hearts.  I cursed.

Today her friend comes to visit, but he steps through the world of two hearts easily.  He, with one, could never understand.  The hearts shivered, shook, and separated as he glanced at the walls.  The sun beamed with the brightness of one.  She crumbled within as he broke her world and proclaimed it unreal without even uttering a word.  A glance cut like a shard of glass.  Her smaller heart was already slashed and bleeding.

She cried when he left.  He could not see the words in her silence.  How could she speak with distinguishable sounds to someone lacking one heart while she had an extra?  He had looked hurt.  Whose world hurt more she could not say.  Drowning over suffocating.  Two hearts over one.  I screamed.

She sat without thinking in the hard plastic chair.  People stalked across her line of sight, walking, running, and speaking in harsh lines.  She went through the motions of interacting, even to the point of speaking their spiky speech.  Survival branded itself across her body as she touched reality.  The sharp edges cut into her soft world.  In the back of her mind a vague ticking began to the back and left.  She turned.

A smile crept out of a frown and back, written on two faces.  Someone who understood.  He sat, unmoving, in a hard plastic chair, out of sync with the world.  She hummed his tune faintly.  Two beats melded together into melody and harmony.

Two of hearts.  I wept.