One Hundred and Fifty Beats

All I can think about is the way the stubble on my legs is catching on the fabric of the chair I am sitting in. Or my feet, sticking slightly to the cold and clammy floor of my home. The cool air passing behind my neck and raising goosebumps on my arms. The way the sun, red and hot and slowly setting through my window, is reflecting off of a mirror in the cover of the book my daughter is reading at just the right angle to cover my vision with angry dots that multiply when I blink. I can look directly at her, but I cannot see her through the white hot replicas of the sun in my vision. I can look directly at her, but I cannot see her.

The necklace echoes beats in tandem with my heart. One hundred and fifty left to go.

The clock in my kitchen is fast, and even now, it ticks a fraction of a second faster than the watch on my wrist, which ticks sometimes faster and sometimes slower than the necklace at my throat. I notice the second hand of my watch is almost in sync with the necklace, which causes the necklace to speed up as my heart rate does. Perhaps it is for this reason I have rarely been still. I hate the sound of my watch competing with the sound of my heart. One hundred and thirty-five left to go. I force my breath to slow, try to still the swell in my chest. I am not ready. I am sitting. The chair catches against my legs.

My daughter is laughing now, pointing at something in her book and calling me to look. My vision is cleared and I do as she asks; soon, she will be met with the clang of bells that toll my final tick, the whirr of sirens who will come to get my body, but for now - for one hundred and twenty-one more beats - we can laugh. I am trying to stay present, to hear my own laugh and look out of my own eyes and feel the skin of my hands against one another as I clap for my daughter, but I am jealous. The necklace around her throat, ticking so much faster than mine but with years and years and years ahead to slow, glints in the same blinding sunlight. I am ashamed to admit that I am thinking of what might happen if I snatched it off of her tiny, fragile neck - if her hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of beats could suddenly be mine.

She calls to me again and in a guilty flutter the thoughts vanish. I am suddenly so painfully aware of how I have failed her. When the bells toll, and the people come, they will find my daughter here, reading a book to the body of her mother who was too afraid to make arrangements for the end of her life. Will she cry? Will she, with only thousands of heartbeats behind her, even understand that I am gone? That my heart has been halted? That the machine which has counted my pulse all my life has finally completed its mission and ended mine? She will not be the only child left alone in the wake of her parents’ death; it is one of the problems the solution has created. Thousands of children with no one to turn to, no one willing to risk the rise in heart rate that taking in a child will inevitably cause. I should have thought of this. I should have made arrangements. I should have been better than I am. My pressure rises. My heart speeds up. I breathe. One hundred and eight beats to go.

It isn’t like in the old days, when death was a surprise and accidents happened. I have known, since I was old enough to know anything, exactly how many heartbeats stood between me and the end. I, like everyone else who has come of age in this country, sat through the pamphlets about rising sea levels, overpopulation, depleted resources, population control. Disease eradication, lack of space. Guaranteed health until a guaranteed death. Surrounded by so many other faces with billions of beats to go, we felt we had the world ahead of us. It didn’t matter that they warned us not to rush, not to blindly chase jobs and titles and drugs and drinks and bodies and more, more, more while our blood pressure and heart rates skyrocketed.

Back then, I didn’t have only ninety-four beats left. I still had a billion left, and when he smiled at me at the counter of the bar we loved to go to and held out the tiny white pill that looked so small and beautiful against his warm skin, when he kissed me like the colors that had become so vibrant and alive were personified in me, like I was the green and orange and yellow and blue that spiraled and danced from every surface in sight and he could drink me into his purples and reds and dark, deep pinks like an ocean, like my body was the sound of a saxophone blaring a single piercing note and one touch could make me swell into eternity, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my heart was racing and adrenaline was coursing through my veins alongside chemicals that cost me thousands of beats in a single night. I was alive. I was alive, and I was in love, and I had millions of beats to go.

I am sitting. I can feel the fabric of the chair against my skin. My daughter is babbling and it sounds like speech. The facial expressions, the hand gestures, the tones of her voice are the same that I use, and I am leaving her. Seventy-eight beats to go.

My feet feel heavy against the slick, smooth ground. How odd that in a minute - maybe less - the weight of my body will no longer be a sensation I feel. My hands are like lead. I close my eyes and focus on the hair growing out of my head. I breath. Seventy-two beats… seventy-one… seventy beats and my daughter is smiling at me. Sixty-nine beats and she says my name again. Sixty-eight beats to go before she is alone.

If I am able after I die, I will miss the red, red sun crawling across the sky and casting shadows against the walls of my home. I will miss the red, red dirt that coats the window to my home. I will miss the deep red of the sky at night, the soft red of the sky in morning. I will even miss the red, red necklaces around my neck and hers, their perfectly symmetrical folds carved into a heart shape that in no way resembles the organ it controls. Sometimes I even find them pretty. And then they sound their ticks. Sixty-one beats to go.

Someday, she’ll pass out Valentine’s in the same heart shape to her classmates in second grade. Or, maybe, she’ll open a haphazardly wrapped gift from her first young lover and find a locket, a profession of love, that she’ll often, in the future, find tangled up with the necklace warning her that, like young love, all good things end. Maybe she’ll doodle hearts across her notebooks in college, studying to be a… what? A doctor? A dancer? A writer? Maybe hearts will form the pattern that will cover the stiff, callous blanket some nurse will wrap around the shaking body of her nearly newborn child, fitted with a necklace and a device to count its heartbeats and ready to be cuddled, drunk in like the smell of fresh-baked bread, showered in all the love and affection her remaining beats will allow her to give. But I don’t know. I will never know her. Fifty beats and I will never again know anything at all.

I should have left him sooner. I should have moved away, shipped myself to another country with better odds, should have ended her life the moment it started, should have never brought a child into the world with so few beats to my name. I should have never touched a drop, or smoked a puff, should never have laughed or cried or screamed across streets and oceans and years at hopeless causes. I should have forgiven myself and let my worrying over the past go. I should have left the hustle. I should have slept. I should have rested, savored my time, every single heartbeat, with the face staring up at me now, believing in something good in spite of the red, red, red at my door, my window, my throat, in my veins, threatening to freeze now and forever.

This is it. I can’t count them anymore. There are too few. How do I say goodbye when I am her whole world? This will be my final mistake. In the room with the cold, clammy floors, next to the chair that caught on the stubble of my legs, as the red, red sun glints off of the walls of my home, I lie down and pull my daughter, all soft skin and wild, wispy hair and trust, to my chest. She asks me to read her book, but my breath is caught in my throat, and I tell her to show me what she sees instead. Her voice, half babbling and half words I didn’t even realize she’d learned since yesterday, reverberated against my chest and our hearts beat, beat, beat together. We are together. I have done so much wrong, I have wasted so much time, I have broken her heart before she knows what that means. Our hearts beat together, and that is all I know until it stops, and there is only one heart beating, and my daughter reads to me in the voice that I love until, unknowingly, she is alone.