The sun shines brightly, peering around clouds. She can feel it warming her skin, yet she feels goosebumps rising. Trying to fight off the cold, she crosses her arms tightly and hunches her back. It’s the middle of summer, but still she trembles.

She steps out into the summer heat, and her heart shivers. It echoes to her extremities. Her friends look at her oddly, so she pastes on a dismissive smile.

She waves cheerfully, still unable erase the cold arms that surround her. The frigid hand of death that reaches not for her soul, but for her heart. It is not there to take her life. It is satisfied with that which it has recently taken. That of someone close to her. Close enough that it gained a soul, and the mourning heart of another.

Now she is halfway to death. A doll, with a permanent smile and eyes that shutter closed the moment people look away.

Now she is frozen, unable to move on from her loved one’s death. Instead she remained trapped within death’s comforting embrace.

For death understood the pain she was feeling. Death knew her devastation, her loss. Death was there to freeze together the shattered pieces of her heart.

Death courted her, and obtained her heart.