My Heart


Thump….thump……..thump………………thump……………………………thump. My heart pounded, slower and slower as each moon passed. What the hell was wrong with me? Why was I doing this to myself… or was I? It was almost as if I could care less. Apathetic? Some think. Helpless? Others think. Adrift? I think.


I am sure and almost positive that you have all heard a story, a salacious story chock filled with secrets and things better left unmentioned. Yet to our disbelief mentioned. And once a secret leaves the safe haven of the cocoon of your mouth, it can never be returned. As once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it will never again be able to crawl the surface of the earth.


That day was yet another “ordinary day”, not to be cliché, but to be blatantly honest. My agenda had come to halt ironically as did the icicles from forming. I sat in the sunroom of my basement in the corner and curled up in a ball as tight as my fathers fist. I glared at the snow as it flew in the breeze and tumbled along in the wind until it hit a single blade of grass, only to morph into water. In the midst of all of this, I had a thought. A single thought that I had never thought to think until that very moment. This thought is something that I have been holding onto ever since that dreary day in December three winters ago.


I ran up the basement steps, into the foyer, up the living room steps and into my very own room. A room all to myself, a place of pretend… where evil couldn’t touch me, and where sticks and stones could break my bones, but words could never hurt me. I opened my drawer and rapidly began to pull out workout clothes without even thinking. I slipped off my shell and felt my body. I looked in the mirror, and was not at all satisfied with what I saw staring back at me. Tears began to stream down my face. I felt my ribs and they seemed almost non-existent. And my stomach, oh my stomach. I felt like a monster, a monster slowly destroying itself. I pulled at my body, and my so-called “curves” that hadn’t even formed yet. But I saw them, as clear as I saw the moon night after night, and the stars peaking out from behind the clouds 365 days of every year for 13 years. I screamed out in pain. Why had I let myself become this way? Why was I seeing myself for who I really was for the first time?
I savagely dressed myself and ran back down the flights of stairs into the basement. I plugged the treadmill into the wall, and I ran, I ran but got nowhere you might say. But I would say that I ran to hell and back. I ran until my legs burned, past the point of “fun”. I ran for myself, for everyone who had to look at me. I ran to escape my corpse, a body slowly decaying. I worked to become invisible, a talent I still have not yet mastered.
I went through the days mindlessly, my heart thumping less and less. When I went to sleep at night, I swear I could hear my heart stop, only to jumpstart again. How close I was to death those nights, I may never know. But I do know that my body was giving up. It was tired of fighting, and losing every battle. Only weeks, maybe a few months from now I knew that my heart would stop, and maybe just never jumpstart again. Part of me was frightened, and the other part of me was totally nonchalant.
That year was my first near death experience, where I not only nearly died physically, but where I died a very mental death. Only to find myself starting to remember how to live once again, without my room of make-believe and pretend. Thump