Heart Trouble Will Find Me
You rest your head on my chest until I feel the heart attack coming. I kiss your forehead and use two hands to lift your head onto the pillow. I tangle my fingers in your gold hair for just a second. “Again?” you say. “Again,” I say. I get out of bed and walk for an hour in the rain with headphones in. Listening to The National makes me feel past tense.
/ / / / /
Living with chronic chest pain is living with a constant, physical reminder of death. More than a reminder―a warning, a tease, shooting daggers that threaten to kill me daily.
/ / / / /
The therapist tells me to see the cardiologist. The cardiologist tells me to see the therapist. They both say nothing is wrong, so it must be stress or panic disorder or some other related issue that can be medicated. Citalopram―SSRI, once daily―and Clonazepam―brand name Klonopin, take as needed. Stop drinking coffee, it increases the heart rate; stop drinking alcohol, it negatively reacts to the drugs; stop doing drugs, they make everything bright and painful. You need to exercise, unless it makes your chest hurt. If it makes your chest hurt, don’t exercise.
/ / / / /
For a year and a half I have felt on the verge of death. This is an overreaction; my heart is healthy, my cholesterol is perfect, god itself must be controlling my blood pressure. But I cannot reason with angina. It is a bad tattoo of a persistent grimace on my face, a rubber band around every artery I can find a Wikipedia article for: right coronary artery, posterior descending artery, left circumflex artery, lateral thoracic artery, etc.
/ / / / /
My dorm room feels safe. I eat half a weed brownie with my roommate and watch Regular Show for ~30 minutes before it sets in again. I stand up. I pace. I shower. I sit down. I assume the fetal position. I do not sleep. I go to the hospital. I wait for two hours while my friends watch Russian-language soaps that are playing in the waiting room. I get an X-Ray. I get discharged. I get billed. I don’t have health insurance. I don’t die.
/ / / / /
Yesterday someone asked me what I write poems about. I didn’t want to say “chest pain” but I didn’t want to say “love” either. I didn’t say anything.
/ / / / /
A song by Typhoon asks, “When am I going to feel better? I have been patient for a long time,” and I think I cried the first time I heard it. Later that night I got drunk and told Angela that I had found a brother. What that means, I am unsure―I have yet to work out the rules for having a relationship with constant chest pain.
/ / / / /
I think I was in second grade when my father had his first heart surgery. My mother tells me that when he was released from the hospital, I wouldn’t leave his side for a week, I wouldn’t go ten minutes without hugging him. It was two years ago when he had his second heart surgery. I live-tweeted it.
/ / / / /
When he asked what shape or form I imagine the pain would take if it physically existed, I said to my therapist, “A red eagle flying above the desert.” He told me that most people say square or dodecahedron. I replied that all my family members are amateur ornithologists and he says oh. When he asks me the same question six months later I tell him that the bird is green.
/ / / / /
I return to you in bed with Matt Berninger singing “learn to appreciate the void” stuck in my head. I hum it in faulty baritone into your collarbone. It is 3 AM and I feel better; maybe just for the night, maybe for a week, maybe forever. You stir in your sleep and throw your arm over my chest. It feels good. I close my eyes and continue humming.
Jakob Maier is a poet and musician in Oxford/Tacoma/Portland. He blogs intermittently at iammaier.tumblr.com and tweets @iammaier.
If you like what you just read, please hit the green ‘Recommend’ button below so that others might stumble upon this essay. For more essays like this, scroll down and follow the Human Parts collection.
