Intravenous drugs can cause heart problems.

So, something interesting actually happened today.

My heart stopped.

“Cardiac arrest” they call it.  My heart stopped beating long enough for my blood to stop circulating long enough for my brain to stop working. “Clinically dead” they call it. For 57 seconds. 

What a failure.  I couldn’t even make it to a full minute.  I can’t do anything right.

One second I was naming the stupid ducks in the stupid lake and next thing I know, the familiar smell of lavender and… quite frankly, heaven, flooded my head. But instead of the rush I’m used to, it burned. Like the very first drag you ever took, some pilfered Newport100 that your older friends gave you. Cool, dry fingers untangled my hair from my eyelashes and when I finally forced the lids up, there she was. 

Imogene.

My Imogene. 

My… something… my what?

She was in a rickety folding chair, little knees pressed against the side of my bed and her sweet little hands on my face, cooling the skin just by touching it.  I stared at her for a second, blinking hot, blood-tinged tears away as fast as I could to keep her from getting too blurry.  But it was her.  She was there.  She was near me again, touching me again, lighting the room and setting fire to every sense I never knew I had. 

And then I guess it happened.

When I finally came to, she was gone.  Again.  I guess it was decided I wasn’t well enough for all that excitement and she must’ve been excused from the room.  I can’t really breathe so well on my own.  My heart beats weakly, sending the machine it’s hooked up to into hysterics every twenty minutes or so because it decides to stop and take a rest.  The only thing I find myself really doing on my own is blinking.  But no matter how many times I do I can’t blink away enough of the wet sticky drops to fix the sight of what’s in front of me.

And it's just a chair.

But it's an empty, rickety, folding chair.

Imogene, my Imogene, come back.

I’m sorry.

I try to look out the window at the lake but I can’t bring myself to do it.  I don’t want to see sunsets or birds or ripples or fish.  I want to see her.  I want my lungs to hurt from that goddamn motherfucking smell, not from the exhaustion of just… working.

Life is being pushed into me on the constant, air is forced into my body and bags and bags of life, of blood, and electrolytes and antibiotics and whatever, magic for all I know, drip-drip-dripping into my superior vena cava the way my wounds and slashes used to drip-drip-drip with her.  I can read the people around me.  They’re convinced I’ve got both feet in the grave and they’re just waiting for me to go ahead and lay down.  But Jesus God I haven’t felt this alive in a long time.  Since we were together.  Since she was mine. 

She was here. 

She smoothed my hair back from my forehead and she wept for me.  I felt it. I saw it. Imogene, my Imogene, my beginning, my end.  I love you so very much, from every corner and empty room of my heart that’s waiting to be filled with you.  With every weak, insufficient beat.  With every failing, flopping valve.  Faintly pulsing, “ba-bump…ba-bump…ba-bump…ba…bump…ba…” (Nothing.)

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, ad nauseum.

Sometimes my heart remembers itself and resumes, “ba-bump…ba-bump”. Sometimes they need to lovingly -read: shockingly- remind it.

Wherever she went, and I like to think it was to the cafeteria so she could fret over black coffee, I know she hears it.

“ba-bump…ba-bump…ba-bump…”

Sip. Fret. Sip. Mourn.

“my-want…my-wish…my-world…”

Sip. Fret. Sip. Mourn.

“come-back… come-back… come-back…”

She’ll come back.  She always does. I think that’s what wakes my heart up when it falls asleep with my eyes, just knowing I did that to her.

For everything I could say about Imogene, and Lord knows I could go on, Imogene could wax poetic about me.

It was these eyes, heavy lidded liars that they are.  It was this heart, this weak, poisoned, ineffective quitter.  We’ve got her.  We always will.

I died today, even if only for a minute.

Thank God it happened too, because I was beginning to worry I was never really alive to begin with.