I wonder, can someone find a love they've never felt?

“You made those shoes?” she asks.

I stare at her, blank.

“Do they make you run super-fast?” she smiles.

She talks to me as if the world is normal. All I can think of is what I’ve done to reach her, what I’ve become.

I decorate my face with a mask, a persona, but it’s a barrier between us. How could any part of me yearn to escape whatever this is? Am I that coward?

“Do you love me?” she asks.

The words seem out of place when I say: “I... have scars... lots of them.”

She pauses, confused, but recognition grows in her body language. She turns, lowers her protective garments, trailing them down her back, stopping at her waist. There are scars: gunshot wounds, burns, cuts. I realize now she too wears a mask. Why are we doing this? It’s not the physical scars, is it? It’s the internal ones that make us hide.

“Some of my scars can’t be seen,” I caution, “not scars—wounds that never healed.”

The wind kicks up sparks from the fire at our feet, from burning buildings around us. It rains embers and ash, but we continue to stare at each other through our masks. She waits, I think with eagerness, yearning, fear, and shame of her own.

It’s taken all year to grow the flowers I hold, such beautiful things that can’t survive the real world. They remind me of who I was before life did what it’s done to me.

“Me, too,” she says, “wounds that won't heal.”

Thoughts fly through my mind. The risk, above all, in allowing myself to be vulnerable, to put my heart in her hand and trust her not to crush it.

“I want to heal my wounds.”

She seems as if the concept never occurred to her. Now that she sees the possibility, she wants it. I don’t believe in love, but something calls to me when I look at her. Maybe I don’t know what I believe, just what I’ve seen.

“I can go super fast in these shoes. Want to see?” I ask.

“Let’s race,” she says.

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