Somebody once told me that the heart beats faster at sunrise. I didn’t believe him, but somewhere inside I could feel my heart murmuring to me, “It’s true, I do beat faster when the sun breaks the horizon, I beat harder, I can’t stop.” It was our biological clock, they said.
It was then when I saw the first flash across my eyes of frantic cuts crossing wrists, a snow-covered heap of pills on my pillow, a looped leather belt hanging from the top of my bedroom. What would happen if my heart stopped, if I would die, would all the sunrises weaken away and there would be infinite darkness?
When an ambulance rushed me over to the emergency room, my eyes smoldered and deep in the center I felt a piercing pain paralyzing me, as though I had just finished staring at the sun for a century.
My chest was heavy and deep down in my throat there was thorough death, piercing and black, vibrating all over.
“Are you okay, dear? Hold on tight, we’ll be there in just a few minutes.”
I faded again.
The next time I opened my eyes the sun was high above me and a harsh break of air fumbled with my dumpy hair. Was it morning already? It was not even midnight when I did it, not even midnight!
Men and women in crisp ashen jackets rolled me down the asphalt to the hospital structure, a razor-sharp prickle of an IV tugging at my wrists. They were as pale as ever, no crimson scrapes like I imagined. A smirk swirled over my face, a petite circle above my chin. What have I done? The joy abounded in my lungs, but my teeth were closed. What have I done to myself?
My eyes thundered shut and I couldn’t slide them open, my curls soaking down my back, my skin flaring away with the sun.
It wasn’t night, it was morning, noon, whatever it was there wasn’t any darkness and the sun had already risen hours before. The boy was lying, I raged in my mind, lying, lying, lying. I knew my heart has stopped; why else would my chest be so compacted and my stomach burn itself to the core?
Unconsciousness tingled at my senses and soon my sealed eyes turned on to the emergency room, and they were turning me over, telling me to throw up.
“What did you do to yourself, honey?” Mother inquired of me, a mixed expression of anger and pain in her eyes.
I gagged onto the pillow, doctors and nurses everywhere attempting to keep me alive and awake, my sister praying in the corner, holding slim slippery prayer beads in her palms. I looked at my puke and I witnessed an unfilled, dull sea, without any pills or the remains of drugstore medicines or doctor-approved antibiotics that could make you high in a matter of minutes and make you dead in a matter of seconds. Only water, not even the golden acids that emerges every time the emotions inside you burst. Crystal-clear water.
Not even blood.
The second flash of cut wrists was when my father decided to kill himself jumping off our apartment building. My mother wept through it all, acquainting us with the facts of how he had a sudden, traumatic heart attack while we were in school, even though the sidewalk right beneath the building was covered in splattered brains and blood. Adding one and one makes two, but my mother added wrong and to her it was all a hundred percent okay, we will survive.
As a man stood over me and gave me a nippy CPR, I lightened and the heavens took me to them. I wish it was final, because in what was hours later, I found myself on a springy bed and a breathing mechanism hooked to my mouth and nose. I took it off sluggishly and touched my neck, my throat, fingered the bones above my heart and I felt nothing, no pressure at all.
I didn’t hang myself either.
The night before was far away.
Finally, at nine o’clock in the night I had decided to make it happen. I just did it, wanted to see if my heart will just stop and nothing would happen, just to make sure everyone in this world will experience what my entire existence has been.
Night.
Forever.
I leapt from my bed and swiftly darted to the bathroom tub and turned on the water so scorching hot that sweat buds formed on my face as I propelled my head down under as long as possible and then, it happened.
My breathes ceased. My eyes shuddered.
My heart… like the sun, it was down.
That’s how it all happened, why my hair is still damp and my skin crinkled and drenched.
So the sun didn’t stop rising. My heart didn’t stop. The heavens didn’t take me. The heavens already had a blocked heart, a heart that sat in the center of the sky, watching over us like God in her almighty presence. The sun was the heart of the heavens, a striking reminder of a barren core entrusted upon me.
He was the sun.
The prayer beads, the link.
My heart, the sky—the heavens themselves.
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I wrote this last year.
The main problem wiith this is that I think it's too obscure, too nonsenical, too all-over-the place--if you're willing to critique this, this topic would be of the most help.
Thanks!
