Saturday, September 29, 2007

battle of the bulge.

twenty-one seconds. one way. twenty-one seconds and i'm suspended inside a small box with buttons in an invisable hole. an elevator. i'm talking about an elevator. i've had a lot of nightmares about elevators. falling. stopping somewhere at the top of a building and suddenly everything breaks. going up at insanely high speeds with no promise of what will eventually stop it. having no control and no way of escaping. no way of getting out of that damn box. falling. and my heart. my heart pounding against my sternum. hitting the ground, and then... blackness.

i figure that these dreams have to do with me feeling out of control, if you're into interperetations. which, i am. i also have dreams about catepillars the size of whales chasing me in the desert, the ground above them rising like it does in the cartoons when bugs bunny is digging his way to china. interperet that.

it feels like christmas outside today. don't ask me why. maybe its the fog. maybe it's the smell of coldness in the air; the being able to feel the difference in temperature between it and your skin. no. its more. its like hope, or something... like a wieghtless day that leaves you full. its a red day. its round. and you smile even if you don't want to. there's just something about that day, isn't there? its... just kind of bursting. today was like that. don't ask me why.

did you know that it is actually possible to die of a broken heart? takotsubo cardiomyopathy. it is a sudden temporary weakening of the muscle of the heart. 'broken heart syndrome'. leave it to japan to give it a name twenty times more awesome. it comes from "tako tsubo", which means octopus trap. i don't know a lot about octopus traps. or how they relate to hearts, really. not to mention broken ones. though, i suppose it has to do something with the fact that traps of any sort have the tendency to maul whatever it is they've trapped. but that's beside the point. the point is, takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a bulging out of the apex of the heart with the preserved function of the base of the heart. strange. the apex. the greatest point. the pinnacle. the climax of that ever strong muscle that keeps us alive. and how strange that it is this, the most important portion of our hearts, that begins to swell when broken. a physical manifestation of our pain. our hearts response to having lost something, or a piece of something, far greater than anything explainable. and its like all that pain and all that love becomes too much for it to bear and so it tries to break free. but it can't, because without it being a part of us for a time we'd be dead. and so our hearts expand. they do the unthinkable so that we can keep on living. and we do, don't we? at least most of us. the swelling eventually goes down. the pain slowly subsides, and our hearts keep on pumping. perhaps stronger than before. takotsubo cardiomyopathy. octopus trap. our hearts are bigger than we know.

twenty-one seconds. twenty-one seconds and i fall in six, give or take a few. depending on what level i'd reached before it snapped. twenty-one seconds and i go up forever. faster. and my heart. my heart could burst. but today... today i think, i'll enjoy the ride.

and i keep on living.

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