It's as easy as A B C

I have a literary girl crush on Doris Lessing.

When I read The Habit of Loving I said to myself: I need more of this woman. When I read The Golden Notebook I said: this is what it IS to be a woman.

I am currently reading a book of Lessing's short stories titled A Man and Two Women. I'm not done, but I can tell you right now that my favorite story is "How I Finally Lost My Heart".

I always see Lessing's main characters as Lessing herself. This is the same way I read Anais Nin. In this story, the main character is ruminating on past and future loves. She gives them letter denotations. There was A who she loved purely and he broke her heart. Then there was B, but they were both burdened with issues and baggage so it didn't work out. Then there is C who could be anyone. He is the future. And all those "affairs or entanglements" in between? They "don't really count".

Agreed Doris.

However: "It is well known that what doesn't really count for me might very well count for you."

...

So Doris is looking out her window, and she sees C. Before she knows it, she has cut her heart out of her body and it is in her hand, ready to give to him. Literally. She then realizes:

"I would not dream of regretting my affairs, or experiences, with A and B...there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could."

And she does. She wraps her heart up in her hand and escapes to a cafe. Only at the cafe she witnesses a woman on the other side of love. The wrong side. Her husband is also in the cafe and he is with another woman. Doris, and everyone else there watch as this woman publicly breaks down. Finally, Doris stands up and gives her heart to the woman. Doris leaves the cafe thinking: "No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom..."

There is a melancholy tinge to the final outcry of freedom. Because at what cost did this freedom come? And is freedom without your heart worth it? On the one hand, it is comforting that instead of handing her heart over to someone who would abuse and not appreciate it, she truly handed her heart over as a gift. There wasn't the narcissistic desire to have my needs/wants/wounds/baggage taken care of before I think of you.

There was simply a need seen and the most precious gift any of us have given.

"We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's face like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: 'Take my wound.' Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all, one simply expects to get rid of one's own."
Doris Lessing