This is my heart
The ruckus originated in the depths of whatever was left of my litterbox heart. It was like a small screaming at first, a baby heard from eight blocks away in the early-morning stillness of a European city. A muffled smoke alarm from an apartment three floors down. A slight ripple of unease as the sharpened pieces of what used to keep me alive registered a disturbance in the force. A polite shuddering like the beginning of a teacup shattering in reverse, the pieces starting to wobble, preparing to leap back to the point of impact to form a teacup again but then, exhausted by effort, resting.
Or something less, even. Like sizzling bacon also sounds like rain or applause. Unidentifiable but existing. The twitch of a corpse on an autopsy table. A punching bag in a garbage dump getting small, effort-soaked twinges of memory. Remembered impacts making this organ in my chest move like a dreaming dog. The far-off sound of a boomerang coming back for vengeance.
There is a darkness that walks hand in hand with all of us. As sure as Coca Cola spawned Santa, our foundations are from a different era with different values. Snapshot parents pushed the day’s morals on us as armour for a future as unimagined and outdated as a printing press at an iphone convention. We are by definition unguarded. We are gullible by acclimation. The only option is to live with arrows in our pincushion hearts and slings around our broken arms. Crowdsurfing the internet, using the chatter to drown out the chatter. Covering up the noise with more noise. Running from the silence that reminds us of beginnings.
My heart is the abandoned house that kids throw rocks at on a dare. The emotionless shark-eye vacuum of emotion. A hole where one should not be. A black circle making phone calls to numbers that no longer exist. A child with no hands that longs to finger paint. The instructions on the back of an assisted suicide kit. A warning label so verbose that the pictograms and multilingual paragraphs bleed into one giant rained-on smear of caution.
tags
Or something less, even. Like sizzling bacon also sounds like rain or applause. Unidentifiable but existing. The twitch of a corpse on an autopsy table. A punching bag in a garbage dump getting small, effort-soaked twinges of memory. Remembered impacts making this organ in my chest move like a dreaming dog. The far-off sound of a boomerang coming back for vengeance.
There is a darkness that walks hand in hand with all of us. As sure as Coca Cola spawned Santa, our foundations are from a different era with different values. Snapshot parents pushed the day’s morals on us as armour for a future as unimagined and outdated as a printing press at an iphone convention. We are by definition unguarded. We are gullible by acclimation. The only option is to live with arrows in our pincushion hearts and slings around our broken arms. Crowdsurfing the internet, using the chatter to drown out the chatter. Covering up the noise with more noise. Running from the silence that reminds us of beginnings.
My heart is the abandoned house that kids throw rocks at on a dare. The emotionless shark-eye vacuum of emotion. A hole where one should not be. A black circle making phone calls to numbers that no longer exist. A child with no hands that longs to finger paint. The instructions on the back of an assisted suicide kit. A warning label so verbose that the pictograms and multilingual paragraphs bleed into one giant rained-on smear of caution.
tags