Blood And Oil And The Ocean In My Chest

Every night before I go to sleep I try to scrape myself clean, on the inside, where my heart used to be, before I ripped it out and told you to go, I drag bags of broken glass through my veins, I pour acid down them afterwards. I try to cauterize the wound. I try to make sure that nothing can grow back. I do this because hearts can grow back. They're tenacious little fuckers. They come back when you're not looking, and they can start breaking and bleeding at any moment. Mine usually tries to come back when I'm lying in a bed without you. Without my arms wrapped around you, it pumps blood all over my sheets, and I lie there and sob into my pillows and wish that I had scraped myself clean by looking at pictures of you, and remembering the fights and not the softness of your skin and the smell of your hair and the way you'd look up at me, catching me looking at you and say "what?" in that way that you say it that just causes my heart to gush blood like the Deepwater Horizon well gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I'd like to cut my heart from my chest and put it in a safe at the bottom of the sea, but it would pump blood into the ocean whenever I go to sleep, running my hands over the empty spaces where you used to fit so snugly against me. Pumping blood by the barrel full into the abyss while I stare up at my ceiling thinking about how you'd put your retainers in, and how I love your laugh, and your brown doe eyes and long lashes, and how I wish you could wrap your arms and legs around me and I wrap my arms and legs around you, and how I wish we were different people that matched up differently, and how maybe then we could have stayed together and I wouldn't have had to cut my own heart out of my chest and thrown it into the ocean. 

In the morning I wake up. I am very still when I wake up. I think to myself it is another day without you. It has been another night without you. It has been two hundred and twenty nine days since I woke up next two you. That is twenty-three million eighty-three thousand and two hundred some heart beats since I woke up next to you. That's eight thousand two hundred and forty-nine drums of blood coating the ocean floor. I do the math as I brush my teeth. I do the math as I put my clothes on. I do the math of the disaster as I put one arm through the shirt. I do the math of the disaster as I put the other arm through the shirt. I think about how many swimming pools of blood that is (just over three average swimming pools). That's the blood that I have pumped through my veins since I tore my heart out and threw it in the ocean. It's lying at the bottom down there and I can feel the weight of the whole ocean in the cavity in my chest. I can feel it every minute with every step I take and every breath I take and some days I feel like I'm drowning at the bottom of the sea but not in salt water but in blood and its the blood I've pumped through my heart since I told you to leave. 

I read your website every night before bed. I read the poems you post there. I cut myself on your words. I take them in and force them down my throat. I shove their jagged edges into the cavity in my chest. I read your words aloud to myself in my room, only I speak in a whisper because I have the whole weight of the ocean pressing down upon my chest. Some nights when I read what you have written I spring a leak. Salt water leaks out of my eyes. It must be coming up from the cavity in my chest that is tied to the bottom of the ocean.