Put a Blue Ribbon On My Brain

I’m sweating, I’m wheezing, I’m bleeding, and all I can think about as I sprint back home is talking to my lady.

          Me: Why snakes?

I hit send, toss my phone on my bed, and head to the refrigerator, where a chilled Brita pitcher beckons me from behind my meticulously arranged magnet collection.

“DAMMIT.”

A chilled, EMPTY Brita container. I flip the lid off, sending it spinning to the ground, and place the BPA-free pitcher beneath the spout. The anger turns to fear once I remember–or can’t remember, rather–the last time I scrubbed the kitchen floor.

“One. Two. Three. Four. Fi … GOT IT!”

In under five seconds, I bring the lid from the questionable floor to the sanitized counter and turn the cold-water knob. The liquid pours at that perfect speed where the water fills the top at the same rate it drips to the bottom. While beads of clean H2O seep out of the charcoal filter, I check for a response.

          The Lady: LOL

She leaves it at that. Not because she’s vapid or disinterested. She just knows me well enough to know “Why snakes?” was just a precursor to a much longer message. She knows “Why snakes?” is my way of saying, “Are you there?” And I know “LOL” is her way of saying “Yes. Always.”

          Me: Seriously, why do snakes exist? Give me one good reason. And DO NOT say because they eat rats. I will punt a fucking rat off my porch like a placekicker. Try kicking a snake. You know what will happen? It will wrap around your ankle like a garden hose, a garden hose with FANGS!

I toss the phone back on my bed and return to the kitchen.

“Which superhero will it be today?” I ask myself, studying the lineup of Marvel pint glasses I won during a White Elephant gift exchange at a company Christmas party. “Spiderman? No. Tobey Maguire ruined him for me in Spiderman 3. Captain America? No. Leadership skills and an indestructible shield are useless to me right now. The Hulk? Possibly. I am furious. Wolverine? Hmm. I am bleeding. Alright, Hulk or Wolverine? Hulk or Wolverine? Hulk. Or, Wolverine? Hul … verine. Wolverine. I have enough rage. I’m going with Wolverine.”

I grab the glass and shut the cabinet before I can change my mind. The water is far from cold, but it’s a lot cooler than the 103-degree temperature I was stupid enough to run in. I go back to my room and stop myself from flopping my sweaty body on my bed, but not fast enough to prevent Newton’s First Law of Motion from making perspiration rain on my lion blanket.

“Dammit. That’s going to need a wash. But then again, I sweat every night. Yeah, but that’s a different kind of sweat, a cleaner sweat. True.”

I reach for my phone without allowing anymore grossness to fall from my bangs.

          The Lady: LOL. I’m going to assume you didn’t get bit.

         Me: No, but I could have!

I turn Wolverine upside down and drain the glass of its contents. I need a refill, and the phone is coming with me. Before I even make it to the door, I feel a vibration in my hand.

          The Lady: Did you even see a snake?

         Me: No, I didn’t see a snake, but if Jaws taught us anything, its that the things you don’t see are sometimes scarier than the things you do.

I place my phone on the toaster and grab the Brita from the refrigerator, which had no effect on the water temperature.

“CHRIST!”

The roar of my phone vibrating the toaster startles me enough to knock my pouring hand off track. Water cascades over my fingers and onto my mold-resistant standing mat.

          The Lady: Did you at least see a stick that looked like a snake?

         Me: EVERYTHING I saw looked like a freaking snake!

I put the phone on a stove coil and use my kitchen towel to wipe up the spill.

“This is going to need a wash,” I said, noticing the fresh patch of filth on my dish cloth. “SON OF A!”

My phone clamors around the stove, making the drip trays sound like Caribbean steel drums being played with a jackhammer.

          The Lady: Where were you running?

          Me: The Greenbelt.

I put the phone on the bamboo cutting board and toss the towel in the laundry hamper so I don’t accidentally use it again. I’m greeted by a blinking notification light upon my return.

“Note to self: always put your phone on the cutting board”

          The Lady: Why the Greenbelt?

          Me: I thought it’d be a nice change of scenery, but I immediately regretted that decision once I realized all the nooks and crannies turned the trail into one giant rattlesnake Whack-A-Mole. Step over the wrong rock, and HISSSSSSSSS! Your Achilles tendon becomes a serpent’s chew toy.

I put my phone in my pocket and open the sliding glass door leading to the porch.

“WHY GOD!?”

I mistake my roommate’s deflated bike tube for the same abomination that sent my pulse north of 200 BPM during my run. My anxiety reaches its peak when my lady texts me back, buzzing my outer thigh and sending me over the edge.

“TO HELL WITH SNAKES,” I scream, flinging the bike tube off the balcony and leaving it dangling from a tree branch like some kind of evil Christmas ornament.

          The Lady: You practiced that joke all the way home, didn’t you?

          Me: How’d you know?

I take off my shirt, which weighs twice as much as it did before my run, and twist it into a knot. I proceeded to squeeze with all my might, imagining the sweat gushing from the creases is blood spurting from a serpent. I don’t stop until I feel another rumble in my pocket.

          The Lady: BECAUSE I KNOW YOU, BOY!

Her use of all caps proves it.

          Me: THAT’S WHY I LOVE YOU, GIRL!

Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Chris Boyles
Inspired by: "Slow Show" by The National

Devaluation and Bodyworks

First, just empty the overnight bag. It’s going to be put away for a little while. Or a long while. Hard to say when you’re in the heat of a losing battle with reality – a reality that steadily prods your soft parts and whispers that absolutely nothing in life is guaranteed. Not even the regular use of a trendy black bag containing replacement underwear and travel-sized shampoos. Your contract with life was written in disappearing ink.

Ha ha. Joke’s on you.

This opportunity to extract oneself should feel nothing but liberating, because at the top of your skull – the place Buddhists deem to be most sacred – this is where you always knew that your interests were never even close to marrying up with his. He of bullshit and imposter Buddhist exhortations.

But really, this is not a horrific car crash where one of us is walking away maimed.

But still.

You need to unpack. You need to be distracted from the sudden and unsavory change in your circulatory function.

Was there anything of consequence left at his house? The running joke was that you were always leaving earrings under the sofa- exactly where his kids could find them. Curse the resiliency that is the human spirit. Better off to have one’s first injury stay sliced open to fester, rather than endure what has just taken place: a tired rerun that saw you pressing ‘End’ on a conversation with a suddenly incomprehensible stranger. How do any of us hazard the chance to go through this more than once?

Is this really happening again? It’s not until particular words are spoken that you recall the heart to be housed in an elevator attached to cables that span the length of your body. This reminder only resurfaces at the moment you feel the encasement slam into your feet. A free fall triggered by a secret combination of words. A phenomenon that only ever comes when you don’t see it coming at all.

In the seconds following the one-way plummet, you begin to wonder if any effort at braking was ever applied to those supposedly reinforced cables. After all, you’ve been here before. This is not your first ride in the heart-trashing rodeo. But it would appear that the point is moot; only a Pollockian rendition of a shattered heart outline now holds court there in your heels. Sitting right there next to your Achilles tendon. It would appear that life is at least guaranteed a certain level of irony.

None of this gets any easier, the second and third time around. When you have been downsized in someone else’s world, you’ll still gravitate to places that no longer exist. It’s an impulse you’ll entertain at the expense of moving forward. You neglect yourself as your insides try to recover. Appetite, like the sense of smell, takes on a tertiary significance as hunger backs away as a vital need.

The elevator that you are certain lay splintered at your base has inexplicably regained its function – albeit imperfectly. Up and down you now feel it cycle as you step one foot in front of the other, day after day. Except every now and then you notice that it gets hung up in places where you’d rather it not linger. You wonder if your insides have gone permanently haywire. Much like the fictional contract with life, you realize that this vital organ comes with no replacement warranty in the case of eventual malfunction.

This is all for the best. On an intellectual level, you’re happy that he has decided to roll over and stare at other things. Other people. Other women who are clearly superior to you. Other women who will put up with his repellent love for 1990s Kid Rock and the canisters of Kodiak tobacco that he will leave in their cars. Your brain loves to loop through this story, but the problem is that it delivers this sermon from a place that is inaccessible to the heart. Your voice box serves a choke point impeding the elevator’s unobstructed passage, and it makes you feel as though your brain were the most useless and ineffective organ in the body. Almost as unreliable as the heart.

Like the physical need to eat and sleep, this fantastic mind of yours has ceased to appear useful in the daily conduct your new routine. The only activity commanding your attention right now radiates in that transient chamber in your chest. The heart thuds with a rumble that blocks out just about everything in your immediate surroundings. Your brain disapproves of being ignored. It continues with unpacking your toiletry bag, waiting for you to come to your senses.

It’s going to feel bad like this for a little while. The connection between the heart and the brain is the ego, and it takes some time for the two to get back in sync. Like the mediocre musician who always plucks the same three sets of chords, your heart must first have free reign to return time and time again to a sound you once interpreted as melody. This will continue until you one day discover that all of it really does sound horribly out of key. And you’ll wonder why you ever listened at all.

It will take an indeterminate and slow-moving number of days, weeks, and months before you suddenly fail to notice the jerky and irregular cadence that is now your heart’s beating norm. Slowly you’ll even forget that there’s any sort of elevator living inside your chest cavity at all – and this will be the discreet signal that you have at last recalibrated yourself. All of the stinging details will have faded.

Where did I put that stupid overnight bag? By now it’s been awhile, and life has no guarantees. It is with this dictum in mind that you return to your closet and stuff your black bag accordingly.

Get ready, tender heart, because we just might be going down again.

Written By: Megan Hallinan
Photograph By: Emily Blincoe