Thump-Thump-Thump
His heart beat like a drum in my chest.
Thump-Thump-Thump
He was keeping me alive, literally.
"How are you doing sweetheart?" I heard my mother ask above the mighty beep of the heart monitor thing that showed that I was not dead! She reached towards me to brush a few strands of hair out of my face.
I pushed her hand away from my face and rolled over to face the large window decorated with smiling suns and and rainbows. Seriously, rainbows.
"Great, just found out my boyfriend's heart is in my chest and not in his and wow, I feel fantastic." I replied again, this was the tenth time being asked the same question in an hour, this wasn't how love was supposed to work was it? They say God works in mysterious ways and right now he really was, of course this thought process all depended on whether or not God actually existed or not and right now he wasn't earning any damn brownie points.
"Oh Aspen, sweetie..." She moved towards me again but halted when she saw my face, pain flickered across her own features but she quickly recovered "I'm going home alright, call me if you need anything, okay?"
"Yeah." I said observing the red cut open cut stretched across my chest sown up in perfect stitches. Pretty cool, the incision was already starting to heal leaving a small trail of opaque skin that people call a scar. Pretty bad ass am I right?
"You know you shouldn't talk to your mom like that, maybe one day-"
"Maybe one day you'll learn that snooping on a conversation is rude and yes, I understand there's only a friggin curtain separating us but for heavens sake just listen to music or something." I snapped at the boy on the other side of the room. At first I had been patient with him but after a few weeks of laying in the same bed looking out the same sticker ridden window with the same child nagging me about my behavior I got snippy.
"Yeah, I know you keep saying it but I'm not feeling bad about it yet so I guess I'll keep doing it until I do." Juno, the child who was on the other side of the curtain said.
"Wow, okay." I replied feeling a headache coming on just by talking, or maybe it was because I was talking to him. "You officially suck and when I can stand without feeling like dying all over again I'm gonna kick your cancerous little ass from here to next year."
"Well that's not fair, you have like an almost 100 percent chance of living seeing as you didn't die in surgery and you're still alive and well while I'm stuck with the very noble yet totally crappy 30 percent and I'm obviously dying an also noble yet also crappy death." Juno complained as he ripped the curtain to the side.
The skin under his eyes were stained a tired looking purple and blue. Blue like the color of his veins branching out across his body, deep and pulsing against his paper white skin. He had no hair anymore, I had watched them shave it all off a couple of weeks ago. His dark locks falling slowly in the flickering hospital light until it hit the ground, only to swept up by an awaiting nurse.
I turned away, I didn't want to see him. There was too much sickness here, too much pain. You couldn't go a day without hearing a mother wailing at the loss of a loved one or a father kicking and throwing things and he screamed angrily. Juno was just a reminder of it all, he was his sickness. Brayden was my sickness, he was gone but he was within me forever just like cancer was in Juno. Maybe not physically forever but mentally.
Brayden, he had been loving and sweet and kind. Soft dusty antique blue eyes, beige choppy hair that fell into his eyes, strong warm familiar arms. Not anymore, reality of it all was he was dead rotting in his stupid coffin because he had had a vein in his brain pop. Like a balloon. Which is why, I have his heart and he has mine. Figuratively of course, my heart is somewhere else. Probably in a trash heap, feeding a family of mice.
