Today, my runaway heart ran away again.

I was digging holes in the yard with an old metal spade and I found a chunk of rose quartz shaped like a pyramid and I thought about giving it to my best friend Benji who loves pyramids and gemstones and digging in the dirt just like I do. My smile was getting wider and my thoughts were running ahead of me and my chest was thumping like a disco song and I was in love with life and life was in love with me!

But my runaway heart always wants MORE, MORE, MORE and it skipped right out of me and snatched the rose quartz and swallowed it whole and I tried to catch it but it was running so fast that it crashed right through our picket fence and then it was gone!

My runaway heart. The forever-beating part of me that falls fast for all the wonderful wonders of the world. That uncontainable, insatiable part of me that skips to the library on Saturday mornings and dances through the aisles of knowledge and checks out the maximum number of books and reads on the school bus and reads on the couch and reads on the toilet until I’m an expert on abstract art or beluga whales or, lately…digging for crystals. 

But it’s not just things—my runaway heart falls for people too! It fell for my best friend Benji in Kindergarten and when I hug him I never want to let him go because he’s the same as me in so many ways. We both love archeology and we both love gardening and we both space out during math and we both hate ketchup and we both go to therapy and we both have one friend.

But my best friend Benji is also my opposite. He knows how to keep his heart in his chest. Just standing next to him makes me calm like we’re fluffy clouds in a sky-blue sky just floating together with no brains or pains. He never tells me to “settle down” when I get giddy like everyone else does. He’s level-headed and level-hearted even when he gets great news like, last week, when he won the creative writing contest for his story about an eight-year-old archaeologist who gets bitten by a mummy and transported to Ancient Egypt. My best friend Benji cracked a little smile when he picked up his blue ribbon, but I would have cartwheeled down the aisle and high-fived Principal Peters and given a rambling victory speech with run-on sentences because when I’m happy, there’s no way for me to hide my inner joy!

All that’s to say: I knew right where my heart was headed. It was off to my best friend Benji’s house and it had already gobbled up the rose quartz but there’s a lot of beauty between his house and mine and my runaway heart always take the scenic route.

So where would I go first if my heart was in charge?

THE BUTTERFLY GARDEN! 

It’s part of the park by my house. Valentine, the soft-spoken groundskeeper, planted thousands of lilies and poppies and flowers with names I can’t remember and they are all in bloom and it looks like a paint set exploded and I haven’t even mentioned the butterflies yet! Last year, I checked out a butterfly book from the library and we counted over 46 different species in the garden. Monarchs and admirals and swallowtails and buckeyes and painted ladies too. If you stand still, they just land on your hand! I love the butterflies and I love the flowers and I love Valentine for planting the garden because he knew it would bring joy to runaway hearts like mine.

So I sprinted there…but it was too late.

My runaway heart had already devoured the flowers and now Valentine was trying to scare it off with his giant leaf-blower that he wears on his back like a backpack. Butterflies were dancing in the wind and my heart was plucking them down and munching them like floating potato chips!

“Get your heart under control, kid!” Valentine shouted over the noise.

“I don’t know how!” I replied.

It was the first time I’d ever heard Valentine yell and I felt instantly embarrassed and guilty and ashamed and none of those feelings made the situation any better. 

In fact, it quickly got way worse.

Would you enjoy being face-blasted by a leaf-blower? Valentine assumed my runaway heart would hate it, but the opposite was true. Its big smile was flapping in the wind like a hound dog in a convertible.

“You’ve got to turn it off!” I yelled at Valentine, but he couldn’t hear me over the noisy motor and my runaway heart opened wide and swallowed him whole, leaf-blower and all. 

We stood there stunned for a minute, staring each other down, and I knew that my heart regretted eating Valentine, but it still wanted MORE, MORE, MORE so off it skipped toward Main Street with the leaf-blower still rumbling inside. 

So where would I go second if my heart was in charge?

THE OPEN BOOK!

My town is lucky. An esteemed Estonian architect named Soovi Taam designed our little local library in 1994. The building looks like a giant glass novel lying on its spine with all the pages fanned out. She called it The Open Book and travelers come from all over the world to see it for themselves and take ten million photos like it’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 

There’s even a fancy café called Bookmark’s and the manager’s name is Mark and if you order ten mugs of hot cocoa you get the eleventh for free and the punchcard doubles as a bookmark. One Saturday, my best friend Benji and I drank five mugs each and split the free mug and now I know that five and a half mugs of hot cocoa is too much hot cocoa to drink in one day!

Mostly, I go to library to browse the books and talk with the friendly librarians. Miss Arrow runs the children’s section and she’s the kind of person who feels like sunshine on your soul. She’s even more excited than me about books and if you tell her to find you a book about dragons, she will literally grab your hand and literally run you through the stacks and literally tell you to put your arms out flat and literally start piling books up until you literally can’t see over them. Literally! Most grown-ups hide their joy and wonder, but Miss Arrow is old and she wears her heart on her sleeve like me. 

I love Miss Arrow for loving books more than anyone and I love drinking hot cocoa at Bookmark’s with my best friend Benji and I love The Open Book because walking into a library should feel like walking into the middle of a great story.

So I sprinted there…but it was too late.

The lobby was now a hot cocoa hot tub. My runaway heart had ransacked Bookmark’s and poured a year’s supply of bittersweet chocolate on the floor and everyone was wearing brown now. A marauding gang of toddlers with chocolate warpaint was licking tabletops and chair legs and any sweet surface they could find. A well-dressed businesswoman was scooping handfuls of oozing cocoa into her leather briefcase while an elderly man was building a dam to form his own private lake. Mark the manager had stopped managing the situation altogether. He was now throwing mini-marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles in the air like parade confetti. I had lost my heart, but these people had lost their minds!

I took a quick dip and sip then slid and slipped up the stairs to the children’s section, following chocolate footprints to the picture book corner where I saw a surprisingly scene. Miss Arrow was sitting in her wooden rocking chair reading and feeding books to my listening heart, which was now sitting on the story-time rug, still covered in cocoa but finally calm. Valentine’s leaf-blower had run out of gas and it was entirely silent now except for Miss Arrow’s beautiful birdsong voice. I watched as my heart yawned and butterflies flew out and landed on her shoulders and I realized that love is just trust and I must trust Miss Arrow.

So I curled up on the rug beside my heart and listened to the ending.

The story was about two boys who both love sailing so they build a raft but one of them gets swept down a roaring river and his friend has to save him before the raft reaches a big waterfall. The boy on the river bank first ties his hat to his shirt then his shirt to his belt then his belt to his pants then his pants to his socks then his socks to his shoelaces then his shoelaces to his shoes and at the last second flings the clothing lifeline into the middle of the river and hauls his friend back to land wearing nothing but his briefs. Most kids think it’s hysterical but I never laugh because I know what it’s like to worry about your best friend like that.

Last year, my best friend Benji accidentally ate a peanut butter cookie and he’s allergic to peanuts and Mrs Merriweather had to give him a shot in his thigh and after that, an ambulance came and it felt like he was falling off a waterfall too, but he was back at school the next day laughing like it never happened and now I have to hug every time I see him in case I don’t see him again. So that’s why this book always gets me, but Miss Arrow didn’t know that and all of a sudden, my runaway heart started beating faster because it remembered my best friend Benji and the chunk of rose quartz and why it had run away in the first place.

Just as Miss Arrow read “The End,” my runaway heart stood up and ate her in one bite like she was a mini muffin and then it swallowed the rocking chair too before leaping up and crashing through the great glass ceiling, hungrier than ever. 

So where would I go next if my heart was in charge?

TO MY BEST FRIEND BENJI’S HOUSE! FINALLY!

Thankfully, he lives less than two minutes from The Open Book so I raced downstairs and through the hot cocoa hot tub and past a herd of German tourists snapping selfies in front of the chocolate-splattered mayhem and down Main Street and into my best friend Benji’s back yard and there he was, holding hands with my heart. 

“Hi Benji!” I shouted.

“Hi Alexander,” he replied calmly.

“I really wanted to show you this beautiful piece of rose quartz, but my heart got away from me again and it may have eaten Valentine and Miss Arrow and a whole bunch of other wonderful things and I need you to teach me how to keep my heart in my chest like you do,” I said, still catching my breath.

“Oh, that’s easy,” my best friend Benji said. “You just need to love yourself as much as you love me and then your heart won’t ever run away.”

So we sat there and I made a list of things that I loved about myself. My curiosity, my creativity, my passion, my kindness, my humor, my honesty, my imagination, all of my emotions, my whole mind, my green eyes, my big feet, my skinny toes, my birthmarks, my belly button, my double-jointed thumb, my whole body, and most of all, my love. 

When we were done, I gave Benji a big hug, but I gave my heart an even bigger one. I hugged it so tight that butterflies flew out, then flowers, then Valentine and his leaf-blower, then a puddle of hot cocoa, then a mountain of books, and finally Miss Arrow and her rocking chair!

“But where’s the rose quartz?” asked Benji.

“It’s still in my heart but I have a solution,” I said and I started stripping off my clothes.

“What are the heck are you doing, Alexander?” yelled Benji and for the first time ever, he was not calm. 

“Trust me. I think I maybe might possibly perhaps sort of know what I’m doing,” I said, tying my hat to my shirt then my shirt to my belt then my belt to my pants then my pants to my socks then my socks to my shoelaces then my shoelaces to my shoes before flinging the clothing lifeline into my heart.

“Hold on to my shoes!” I shouted. “I’m going in!”

Now instead of having my heart inside of me, I was inside my own heart and yes, it was red and yes, it was bloody, but not at all gory but bright and gleaming like stained glass. Inside, I could feel all the forms of love still lingering in the air like pollen. The way loving nature feels. The way loving a book feels. The way loving chocolate feels. The way loving a friend feels. The way loving yourself feels. 

So I kept feeling around my heart until I put my hand on the pink crystal and, in a flash, my heart was inside of me again and I was back in Benji’s back yard and Valentine and Miss Arrow were gone and so was all the mess and now I was laughing like nothing had ever happened because I made up a whole story on my way to Benji’s house inspired by the people and places along the way.

“This is for you,” I said, handing Benji the rose quartz.

“Thanks Alexander,” he said. “Why are you so out of breath? Did you run here?”

“I took a little detour through the Butterfly Garden and The Open Book,” I said.

“Did you stop at Bookmark’s?” 

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“There’s chocolate all over your face.”