There’s a little cavity in my heart.
Everyday, it grows a little bigger, until every beat is like a blow to the chest that leaves me gasping in pain.
I don’t know when it started.
There’s a little cavity in my heart.
Everyday, it grows a little bigger, until every beat is like a blow to the chest that leaves me gasping in pain.
I don’t know when it started.
I don’t know if it’ll end.
Right now it’s a struggle everyday to just open my eyes in the morning and get out of bed.
It’s been with me for as long as I can recall…this hole. This cavity. It twists and turns on itself sometimes, shrinking and stretching and tearing and gnawing until I think I’m screaming my tongue out, but I’m not.
How long?
How far?
How long has it been?
How much further will it go?
Rise, fall, rise, fall. Place one foot in front of the other.
There’s no thought behind the movement anymore, only a deadened determination to continue plowing on mindlessly without really knowing why, a failing dried-up determination that is slowly deteriorating each day.
Every morning I fight a losing battle with it, the cavity that is spreading and slowly eating me whole.
Sometimes, a little light falls through my window, and I try to take the remnants and sew up the wound with a few threads of hope. But usually before I can finish, a clouds obscures the sun outside, cutting off the light. Darkness falls, I am prevented from completing the job.
But I know…
Even without the clouds, these few frail threads are not enough to span the hideously wide chasm the once-small cavity has become.
It’s become such that each tenous thread does not bind…but only peirces.
As such, I am now afraid to grab onto any of these tendrils. These spiderweb lifelines in their tender fragility would only break and throw me down to a new depth.
Even so, I try to contain it, and I try not to let it show.
But one day I open my eyes and I discover that the cavity is no longer within me.
I’m now inside of it.
Darkness…it’s what the cavity is made of. Darkness engulfs me. I try to run from it, but it apprehends me even as I turn to make a break for it.
…This is my last try, because I simply do not have the strength left in me for another attempt. This time, I’ve been running for days. I woke up and I just ran and ran and ran.
Rise, fall, rise, fall of empty chest. Place one foot in front of the other.
Breath coming in hard and jagged now, fluids rushing to knees and turning them into jelly.
This is the limit. My foot hits something hard and I come to a sudden stop, collapsing into a heap on the flat gray stone that had brought me to a halt. Fingertips brush lightly across a rough uneven surface, a coarse texture cut into smooth stone.
My eyes are hazy from weariness and tears that I didn’t knew I’d shed. Right before the darkness takes me, I make out the etchings on the stone plaque through my blurred vision—–
R . I . P .
1 9 x x — 2 0 x x
XXXXX
D e a r l y B e l o v e d
yo u r l o s s i s a b l o w
t o u s a l l