until we bleed

So we're bound to linger on 

We drink the fatal drop 

Then love until we bleed 

Then fall apart in parts 

it took us 3 hours yesterday. 1 hour to cut open her skull. 1 hour to open up her spinal column. 1 hour just to remove the brain from her head, spinal cord swishing from the back like a ponytail.

i've held a heart in my hands. but only literally speaking, that is. we talk of romantic hyperboles and make references to the Aztecs and their ritual sacrifices, but cupped inside my hands, the heart doesn't feel so monumental. a hollowed mass of muscle fibers and vessels, it weighs lighter than a tennis ball.

there are no hackneyed honeyed words, no dramatic tales of historical intrigue that describe the feel of a brain in one's hands. it sinks into your palms, heavy as a locked chest; you feel the weight and heft of its contents but you can only speculate what is hidden inside. who was this person, what kind of life did she live, what memories were mapped into the ridges and crevices. it's the closest i've ever felt to her--this cadaver whose body we've cut open and examined for weeks.

some of these days, i don't know who i am anymore. my last two exam grades were average, and when your whole life has been revolving around exams, it's hard not to place your value on numbers. i feel painfully ordinary, especially when i don't write. i want to stand out but i want to hide. they gossip here like buzzards, circling for a carcass to scavenge. i am the girl with the bow in her short cropped hair, the girl in black boots. i don't want to be known as the girl who kept dancing at the block party with that one guy who was maybe drunk and oh look what do you think is happening here ho ho ho (what a ho).

i've been thinking about the heart a lot these days. well, literally too, but i mean that in the figurative sense. i think about how long it takes for a person to fall and wonder if i've somehow shut down the part of my brain that surrenders itself to the heart's stupidity. i can see the mental pro/con bullet points under the boy's name and wonder why my gut is silent now. i felt nothing when his hands were at my waist and his fingers were laced in mine. i think of all the avoided gazes and prickling blushes and unsent digital love letters from those forsaken teenage years and wonder if, at age 23, i've lost the ability to let myself bleed.

Now we're bound to linger on

We drink the fatal drop

Then love until we bleed

Then fall apart in parts 

-- "Until We Bleed" by Kleerup ft. Lykke Li