I left a puddle of my stress tears on the waxy paper
Clenching my own hands so tightly till I could feel my heart beating
Wishing I had a hand to hold,
At least my uncle did
The nurse called those fate-determining wires spaghetti
As if the fear that they instilled in my already clenching heart
Could provide some kind of sustenance
Trying so hard to push all of the air from my lungs
As if that would return a number that would save me
I did not feel like I was able to empty myself enough

A pamphlet across the room reads off the words to me “what and why” and that all I can repeat in my head
What if I end up like my uncle
Why does this happen
Maybe my heart, just knew how to do too much, in too little time
Too much love, too much anxiety, too much joy paralleled by terror
Too many palpitations already, all it can do now is clutch to the only thing it knows, my body

The thousands of prayers that so many people in my position must have fired off
On that hard sterile table
Must cause god to see a sheen of white light when he looks down on us
So many little candles lit in hopes that they will be seen

I know that my heart murmur is not just a murmur
It is almost as loud as my voice
But unlike my voice it does not seek for the well-being of my soul and my body
It seeks for itself
A flap of skin with a mind of its own
Sometimes fluttering out words of its own language
Friendly fire
“I love you, I live with what keeps you alive, I control you”
This thing grown within my mother’s womb just like I
A fusion, my partner in development
I pray not, that it has changed its mind
Metamorphosing from a quirk, to tell boys, who want to hear my heart beat,
Something that makes me who I am
Into something that may tear me from the arms of the lovers who pressed their ears in eager fashion to my chest
into something that will make me,
no longer
what I am.