Where the Heart Once Lived

I never really liked winter, it was always too quiet, too still, too inert, and the white made my eyes hurt. The silence made me all too aware of the world around me and in me; jumbled thoughts, stiff joints, the cold air being inhaled, and an unsettling rhythm inside of my chest. 

“You’re very observant,” a teacher once told me, a compliment for my abilities. But compliments meant attention, and attention is a curse. It means to notice, to feel, to exist within the painful pull of every second that dragged on for too long. 

Back then, the winter only made everything worse. In winter, the world would somehow stop long enough for me to sense everything: the crunch of someone’s boots in the snow, the wind whirling outside, and the lub-dub sound coming from my chest that I used to find so irritating. 

Now I crave to feel something, or anything really. How long has it been that I would open my mouth to speak to another? How long has it been that I could feel the chill of winter, or the heat of the summer sun? How long has it been that I could look someone in the eye to see my own reflection? How long has it been that I could feel my own heartbeat that I once despised the sound of? Of course, I know the answer. 

But sometimes, in the thickest part of night, when the wind slips through the dead branches and the snow shifts against the windowpane, I think I hear it again. 

A soft, barely there lub-dub. 

It isn’t mine, and I know that it can’t be. My chest is hollow, weightless, void. Yet the sound threads through the stillness as if trying to stitch me back into a life I no longer wear.

It follows me when I drift down empty streets untouched by footprints, when I pass the warm glow of houses filled with the living who never question the miracle of their own bodies. That borrowed heartbeat echoes faintly behind me, like a memory trying to remember itself. 

Perhaps that is all I am now: 

A heartbeat without a body. 

An echo of someone who once felt too much, now condemned to feel nothing at all. 

The world is quiet again, winter holding its breath, and in the silence, I finally understand: 

Rubatosis wasn’t the curse. 

The curse is its absence.