Microstory 766: Four Spot

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The four spot, or the universal heart symbol, is a graphical representation of the human heart. Historians are unsure who first came up with the symbol. Earliest depictions can be found in prehistoric art from the sixth century BUC, but it is believed to be much older than that. As the myth goes, there were two people deep in love with each other, who used the four spot as their new family crest, intending to pass it down to their children. The four curves represent the four chambers of the standard human heart, and later on as four tenets, ideas, or beliefs. Many religions have adapted the four spot to their respective faiths, and have come up with differing uses for the quadrant symbolism to satisfy their own dogma. The original story, however, says nothing about it. What is present is the intersection of two independent streams of infinity, symbolizing time as cyclical, and that no matter how far one travels from their loved ones, they will always inevitably come back around to their intersection. This is important as the story progresses, predicting a grand reunion between the lovers sometime in the future, after a great cataclysm separates them across a seemingly insurmountable vastness. Supposedly, each of the couple was holding onto one side of the crest at the moment of the calamity. When they were torn apart, so too was the crest itself, with the man retaining only the bottom half, and the woman keeping the top. Later apocrypha suggests the man’s half represents the testicles, while the woman’s the breasts, but this is improbably more than coincidence. The man ended up in the new universe, spreading the symbol to its inhabitants as the only symbol for the heart, while the woman stayed in the primary universe, notably causing Earthan humans to believe that they had come up with it on their own. As the tale predicts, these two universes shall one day be made whole again, and the four spot heart can once again be accepted as the true icon of love.