*A collection of my work that consumes and breathes darkness
Without darkness, we wouldn’t know we are living in the light.
In order to have light, we must have darkness.
Pumping blood
By Emma Abernethy
I was nineteen when my heart attempted to kill me. It didn’t fail all at once. It starved me slowly. Every single one of my breaths felt borrowed. Every step I took felt like I was walking underwater. The doctors said the word cardiomyopathy like it was clinical, like it was detached, like it wasn’t the thing hollowing me out from the inside.
By twenty, I lived in a hospital room that smelled like bleach and quite despair. Machines breathed for me. My mother cried in the hallway when she thought I was asleep. My sister, Sal, read to me from books I stopped listening to months ago.
I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of disappearing. The call came on October 27th.
“A match,” the nurse said. “A strong one.”
Strong. The word should have comforted me. Instead, something in my chest fluttered, not weakly, but eagerly.The surgery felt like I was drowning in light. I remember the mask over my face. I remember thinking: If this is death, it’s warmer than I expected. When I woke up, my new heart was already pumping. Not fragile, not cautious, but forceful and hungry.
Recovery was fast. Faster than they predicted. The doctors were impressed. “Your body accepted it immediately,” one even said, “like it was meant for you”.
Sal drove me home two weeks later. She kept glancing at me like she was trying to spot the difference. My mother hugged me too tight, like she was afraid something might slip out of my ribcage is she loosened her grip.
The first night back in my old bedroom, I lay awake listening to the rhythm in my chest. It didn’t sound like mine. It didn’t hesitate the way my old one did. It didn’t stumble, it pounded in clean, measured intervals. Steady and controlled.
On the third day, I woke up standing in the backyard. Barefoot, dirt under my nails, blood on my hands, not much but enough. I found this odd, and I convinced myself it was a nosebleed, a scratch, anything. But when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I didn’t recognize the way I stood, the way I smiled.
The anger came next. Not emotional anger, not the kind that makes you cry or scream. This was colder, more calculated. When someone cut me off in traffic, I didn’t feel frustrated like I once would, I imagined following them, I imagined how easy it would be.
My mother forgot to knock before entering my room and my body reacted before my thoughts could. My hands clenched. My pulse slowed instead of quickened. I began to crave silence; I started craving control. Then, I found this article. It was hidden in my hospital discharge folder, folded up small, like something meant to remove it but forgot.
A local news clipping.
MAN KILLED IN POLICE SHOOTOUT AFTER STRING OF DISAPPEARANCES
I didn’t recognize the name at first, but I recognized the date. October 26th, the day before my transplant. I kept reading. Diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder at sixteen, history of violence. Suspect of multiple unsolved assaults. Police described him as “charmingly calculated, and incapable of any form of remorse.”
The article mentioned something else. He had signed up as an organ donor. My vision tunnelled, my new heart thudded once. Then something happened that made it all worse. I didn’t feel horrified, I felt relief. Because the thoughts i’d been having, the urges, the clarity, the sudden understanding of how fragile people are, they weren’t random. They weren’t mine, or maybe they were now.
I began to remember things I had never lived. The weight of somebody’s throat under my palm, the sound of pleading turning into silence. The rush, not chaotic, but precise, of deciding whether someone continues to breathe. These weren’t dreams, they were instructional. My heart doesn’t race when I think about hurting someone. It slows, like it is focussing, like it has done this before.
Sal stopped visiting after the night I snapped at her for being too obnoxious. She said I looked at her “wrong”. My mother stopped calling for some reason, right after I asked her about the donor. The hospital refuses to release his full psychiatric history. But I’ve come to realize
I don’t need it anymore. Because when I close my eyes, I can feel it, the muscle inside my chest tightening, steady and patient.
The man who owned this heart was a diagnosed psychopath. And I think he left something behind. Not memories, not emotions, but instinct. The worst part, and it fits me perfectly.
*Stay posted
*More writings to come
emintheclouds 