Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist

New Years Eve, 1999, 11:14 PM.  In a smoky lesbian bar by the train tracks.  Tia turned around for no reason and they collided.  Gina smiled.  They were perfectly eye to eye.  Tia smiled back.

The crowd swelled and pushed them together.  Breast to breast, hips to hips.  Their hearts beat inches apart and the electricity between them was an instant closed circuit.  They kissed at midnight. 

 On February 1st, they moved into a tiny peach house up on the hill from the lesbian bar.  For the next nine months, they celebrated love.  They had sex and made breakfast at midnight.  They painted their tiny bedroom bright red and talked about getting a dog.

On Halloween they dressed as an old couple.  Gina had a walker and Tia padded herself with stuffing.  They both wore mumus and long black socks with birkenstock sandals.  They wore spectacles and wigs and took big swigs of whisky from the same bottle.  Golden Girls plus Absolutely Fabulous.  

By the end of the night they were fighting.  Their first fight and for the first time their singular electric heart beat felt out of sync. 

They took a cab home together.  But everything had changed.  They sat far apart.  The overpass was like any other.  Gina was so confused as the horizon broke into rubble.  By the time they hit she had only begun to realize they were falling.  

Tia saw the crack in the road forming.  She knew exactly what was happening as the overpass collapsed.  It seemed like slow motion but there wasn't time to breathe.  The car drove off the edge at 66 mph and dropped like a rock onto the road below. 

Gina woke up the next day in intensive care after a long surgery to stop massive internal bleeding.  

Two days later Gina learned that Tia had died on impact.  

Gina came home on Thanksgiving day.  Her whole world empty.  The red room had become a lonely hell.  Between Christmas and New Years Eve, Gina received the autopsy report. Tia's autopsy.  Gina had to know why she survived when Tia died. The answer was there in black and white "Traumatic Aortic Tear".  

Gina logged into a chatroom and asked "what causes an aortic tear in a car accident?" She couldn't write the word "Traumatic".  She deleted everything and started over.  "Two people are in a car accident.  They are the same height and weight and.." Gina's eyes poured as she sobbed at the injustice of this random trick.  "One dies from an aortic tear upon impact, one survives.  Why?"

A few minutes later an answer came in her inbox. "The heart is a muscle the size of your fist.  A heart full of blood has more force upon impact, those few ounces of blood will be an amplified by speed." The comment continued to explain but Gina had the answer she was looking for.   Tia's heart had been full the moment the car hit the ground.

Gina's heart had been empty.