NYSSWI: Sloppy Red Organs

On giving my heart away.

I remember when we met. Perhaps one of my most vivid memories, nestled as it rightly is amongst the others that are fading. The day we met remains crisp.

I was alone, halfway across the country, with no foreseeable end to my aloneness except for unwanted encounters with my AirBnB host’s iguana and the inevitability of returning to attend school in Indiana. My aloneness invigorated me to download an app on my phone, create a presentation of desired selves, and tidy up for company. There were many late night messages and flirtatious emoji-sentences, yet there was only one “I’ll pick you up at six.”

I wore my favorite sundress and sandals that would give me an extra inch. I flecked my eyelashes with mascara and tamed my too-long hair with a straightener before walking with an obnoxiously loud heart to where you were waiting outside. You were pacing.

It seemed as if we were both trying to defeat the indefeatable, quickening pace of that sloppy red organ in our chests.

Lucky for us, our efforts failed.

Your laugh caught me off guard. It was high-pitched and spontaneous and not at all appropriate for a man taller than most trees. It tore a hole in the facade of swiping screens and manicured mustaches. So, too, did your car. A beat up 2007 Volkswagen that was nearing its end at almost three hundred thousand miles. A number I couldn’t conceptualize. Where have you been? Where are you going? Can I come, too?

I believe I even beat you at games then. Mario Kart turned into Chess turned into Air Hockey turned into Mini Golf turned into Scrabble turned into Ping Pong. I could tell you were trying. Your competitive spirit wouldn’t allow otherwise, though I always won. We were unmatched; my edge too sharp for yours.

You took my victories in stride before competitiveness turned to obnoxious questions about the “rules” of the game and too many fake Scrabble words that I didn’t have the gusto to challenge you on.

Your competitive edge—sharpening over the next dates—transcended plastic board games when a man who shared your name hugged me under your hooded brow. It didn’t bother me because this dimension meant that I was wanted. I would accept all the hugs in the world if it meant your hand gripped tighter in mine. I was happy to be yours—exclusively, singularly, nonhuggably yours—mostly because I had never wanted to be mine.

Months and years of struggling with self-love, I accepted the ease with which you surrounded me with care, desire, and need. I accepted your love in absence of my own.

It became clear to me, as Fall descended, and the distance between us could not be traversed but for a many-hundred dollar plane ticket, that relationships, and ours, particularly, could not survive without acknowledging our humanity. Our mistake-bound, shared humanity.

Sacrifices to be made. Red-eyes to be taken. Sorrys to be uttered. I didn’t understand what our relationship had become. I tried listening to the indefeatable quickening pace of that sloppy red organ in my chest, and I didn’t hear it. I had forgotten to pack it when traveling back to Indiana. You’d tucked it in your palm many months ago on the night we met. And, worse still, I didn’t have the courage to wrestle it back.

So we stuck still. Many too-short weekends, many long drives in the middle of the night to the airport, and the hope—tangled up in my indefatigable urge for independence—that our proximity would beget our love.

I’d forgotten, like I’d forgotten to pack the sloppy red organ in my chest, that there were others, many miles away, who had tucked parts of that sloppy red organ into their palms and the version you had was incomplete. My mother had a piece. My grandmother. My cousin. My friends. My dogs.

Suddenly the sloppy red organ was in a million pieces a million miles away. Nothing you could’ve done, with your Elmers glue and your sweet, warm cuddles could’ve stitched together a magnitized heart with opposite poles. And yet, you, the man who’d shaven his mustache and traded in his dilapidated 2007 Volkswagen, were to bear the consequences of another misinformed experiment of mine.

We’d seen our mistaken-bound humanity time and time again.

I breathe heaved breaths with only the echo of an indefeatable, quickening pace of that sloppy red organ in my chest.

Lucky for us, our efforts to keep our organs to ourselves failed.

This is where we find ourselves.

Separated by time and space, wondering when we won’t need to unpack what’s already there.

I remember the night we met.

I mourn for those souls.

I celebrate those souls.

It is a night I excavate, I mine for in the other dull memories, asking it to tell me something about today, where I am in a relationship, yet alone. Where two years of mistake-bound humanity has passed, yet we are still glued to hundreds of dollars worth of plane tickets. Where I’d placed my sloppy red organ in your hand—not knowing what I was giving away nor what I was taking—though wrapped in my best sundress and a pair of sandals with an extra inch.

Beat. Beat. Beat.