Air Conditioning

Blood

Knots in my chest aren't something I'm unused to, but here I am. With another knotted mess of bloody threads around my heart, squeezing. And another call where I've said too much again.

In this call where I hear them talk to me, like actually talk to me, for the first time in days, the picture is placed in my head first as a medical diagram and second as a vision of myself.

The cut to the pericardium of the heart on the textbook page, clean, precise. Perfect square right over the septum of the heart, taken out cleanly and the hole left behind, perfect.

The cut to the pericardium of my own beating, writhing heart from my own hands outside of myself, shaking as I hold the scalpel after breaking my own ribs and placing them aside. Shaking as I make that very, very gentle incision on a moving target and watch it seep and ooze. My lines aren't perfect, I know that as I place the jagged edged square of tissue on the side. Left behind in my epicardium are cuts from where the scalpel slipped a little too deep, pulsing with each beat. I look down at my own face with mirrored expressions of horror, tears welling up that can't fall.

It's a quiet suffering, until you speak it. It's a quiet silence until you break it.
It's a screaming voice in your head until it's spoken aloud.

It hurts, again, and it's no wonder without anesthesia, fully aware of the chances of success which were slim but not zero, and playing those odds using my own heart. I should have known better.

But seeing it on a page makes it easier to cope with these thoughts, even after I said too much. Even after the threads squeeze my organs tighter and capture me in their cycle again.

I can't keep doing this to myself. I shouldn't keep doing this to myself.

But will I always feel so full, even as my blood empties? Filled to bursting, even as I slice my arms inner wrist to inner elbow? Will I always cry tears of relief as the blood pours?

Because there was so much, too much of it anyways. Who needs all the excess?

And as my skin pales, I can let eyes slip closed with a smile as I watch them bathe.