Heartbeat

I adjusted the gain of the small, electret microphone until it began to feed back and then pressed it tightly against my chest. The deep, rhythmic pulses, which echoed out from my shoddy headphones, were strangely comforting.

****

I went to school with a girl whose heart failed her shortly after giving birth to her first and only child. She was fitted for a time with some manner of device that was to assist her broken heart. I recall newsprint photographs of her pulling the device behind her as she walked her newborn child outside of the hospital. In one article, she mentioned how she missed the beat of her own heart—how the assist pump would swoosh blood endlessly through her instead of push it along beat for beat.

This has haunted me.

She was to be fast-tracked for a donor heart, but given her petite frame (only a child’s heart would have fit well), she never received one.

She complained of a headache one night.

I sat and listened in horror as her little sister fell to pieces while reading her obituary at her funeral.

-mixtape

~ by mixtape on November 5, 2007.