Smashed Heartbeat

It began with an unchaste kiss, I'm Frank the fucking slut, clothes discarded somewhere in the floor. Drunken smile flashed in the darkness, so many naked bones under my fingertips. I ignored the way his protruding hips thrust into mine forcefully, demanding undeserved attention.

I awoke with liquor tarrying in my palate, the sheets smelling of cigarettes as I threw them off of me. Michael Way's body was draped in the cum-stained blankets, hips poking out in disturbing angles in that haunting way of his; the shy kid from high-school, not a virgin anymore. Maybe it was bullshit what they said about him being a perfectionist, unless he was when fucking. I couldn't honestly remember anything besides the way his sickeningly outstanding ribs crushed my lungs as I gasped for breath. His chest raised and fell, raised and fell, snores tantalizingly lingering my stay in the filthy motel room. Then he was waking up, and I was freaking out, and then all I could see was the warm tears crystallizing his face in one of pure disgust and terror. And I started wondering how many beers had been able to take away his pure innocence.

One, five, ten? I'd lost count amidst a hazy clash of teeth and tongues and the urge to get the fuck out of the bar. It probably wasn't the best idea to invite Michael Way, straight-A student, to have a couple of beers with me just because “Oh, you're crying. You should, like,totally come and get smashed with me to drown your sorrows.”

His asphyxiated eyeballs looked pleadingly at me, begging for me to tell him that no, nothing had happened, that he still was the perfect son to his mother. But I wasn't about to lie, so I bit my lip, canines ripping the delicate skin desperately as I saw his face crunch, chest contracting with unmanageable chokes. Red copper sprouted in my mouth, spreading along the length of my tongue as I advanced towards his crippled, pitiful figure. Sobs shook his awfully thin frame, and then, “Don't touch me.” All I could do was crouch by his side, eyes irrevocably fixed on the way he seemed so physically fragile. At the time, it didn't matter to me that he was emotionally fragile, because all I could really see was his spinal column sticking out of his back, like a leviathan parasite attached to and feeding off of him.

Yes, that's how it began, with an unchaste, alcohol-driven kiss. Sweat, blood, tears. But the more I saw of his revolting skeleton—pelvis, cranium, clavicle, femur, tibia, coccyx, ribs—the harder it was to stop craving it. If he was nicotine flesh, I was the smoker. If he was a monk, I was the idiotic prayer. If he was vomit, I was the bulimic. Yet, in the end (and maybe in the beginning, too), it was the other way around.

I first heard him in the school's bathroom. Stomach acids pushed undigested food up my esophagus as I heard him puking his ugly, little guts out, my own nostrils attacked by the foul stench that nauseated me. His habit was soon replaced. I can still hear her mother, calling me at four am because she couldn't sleep. I can still sense the sinister terror in her wavering phrases, ringing in my ears as she told me about how she'd found ten rotten sandwiches in her son's backpack. It's still easy for me to picture her concerned pupils, orbiting mindlessly in her hazel irises as she searched for the source of that obnoxious smell. I can still imagine said pupils flooding in tears as she found the source of it.

Six months after my discovery he was screaming at me; “I have a problem I have a problem I have a FUCKING PROBLEM!” and the wax tears now burned my cheeks, my weak grip trying to restrain his even feebler arms from throwing punches. Somewhere along the way, we'd gotten to the point where I actually cared about his emotional fragileness; we'd fallen in a grave-deep hole and we kept digging our way towards the center of the Earth. Something inside that porous ribcage of his… something that kept beating even after all the struggles it had to endure. Something about those maple eyes of his just made me dig even faster, submerging ourselves below the lava and the dirt.

A chocolate box rested on the floor, closed yet disfigured, its sugary brown contents leaking slowly through the recently made holes in it. He fell to the ground, dragging me with him; soaking my shirt with a saline warmness. He whispered, pathetic voice searching for empathy in my uninhabited chest, and all I could offer was the promise to let him have my heart forever, so then he'd have a stronger muscle that could fully pump his blood throughout his circulatory system. Maybe the new organ wouldn't be as smashed and damaged as his previous one. But I never really understood the gravity of it all. I should've known, and then I could've joined him in the mission to keep his own heart alive. I didn't know, but he did. When his bony fingers wrapped themselves around the hem of my shirt, he knew. Self-consciousness had smothered him, suffocated him… teased him with false claims of beauty and perfection. I was too engrossed with trying to control myself from hitting him; telling him that yes, he had a fucking problem and it was tearing his life apart.

“Why can't I eat them, Frank? WHY?!” he questioned stupidly, rhetorically, pryingly observing the chocolate box with despaired eyes. My arms were far too long to fit perfectly around his waist, as if a hint that we weren't supposed to fit together and I should let him fall fall fall into that pit of scrawny bodies and underweight corpses. And, as much as I wanted to hold him tighter, the fear that his bone-ensemble would crush under my muscles frightened me. And he was falling falling falling as I let him. Calcium, skeletal creatures had him right where they wanted to. He knew. He knew it was useless to try and transplant my heart into his sliced-open thorax. Still, he had so many questions that I didn't know the answer to. “But… but I feel fat, Frank. Why do I feel like that?” I ask myself the same question everyday, honey. Every single, goddamned day.

“I love you,” I muttered instead, one-sided trio of words that had fallen from my lips an unimaginable amount of times; the same amount of times an awkward silence had cast upon us, followed by him shaking in my arms unconsciously, unable to respond.

Maybe that was all it'd amount to: words being spoken yet unanswered. I think of it as I walk towards his room, pat lit by a hot-white light, consuming every once shadowed corner into brightness. I understand now, I know. But I still want to make this the real beginning, erasing the prologue to our book that is filled with lust, drunkenness, and hungry lips devouring each other. I still want to avoid making this our epilogue.

My hands search in my pockets for reassurance, and it's there, the ring. It feels icy against my fingers, but it doesn't really matter. My hands are trembling as I open the door on a chair and sit by his side. The once noticeable contour of his cherry lips has now faded, and a thin line separating his upper and lower lips is the only thing that's left. Eyelids are purple, translucent, and his ribs are still poking out in disturbing angles beneath the white blankets. The alcohol that once destroyed his pure innocence is now put to shame by the habits that are now making him crawl in a planet of walking skeletons, black and white and black and white leading him towards salvation through an infinite tunnel. But the thing is, he can't walk infinitely. He's on his knees, not even halfway through the tunnel, crawling and crawling and dying. If it wasn't for the steady beeping of the device attached to him by cables, I'd think death had swallowed his life away a long time ago. They called it heart failure. I call it lack of food; lack of vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates… I call it too much chewing gum and toothpaste and water. But the real name is incomprehension, blindness, evasion of his kicks and punches. And I know we should've tried harder to breathe life into his chest, even if it meant him hating us.

Mikey Way shines under the blinding, hospital lights, and I find myself transfixed by the thin lines engraved onto the ring. They're too thin, barely visible, and I throw the metallic circle against the floor. It resounds in the claustrophobically small room, as if it was an echo that would taunt me in my nightmares, and it even wakes him up.

“H-Hi.” It almost sounds final, tragic, the stuttering monosyllable that he dumbly thinks to speak to me as his bloodshot eyes search for mine. I'm seeing his crying figure, crumpled in cum-stained bed-sheets. I'm seeing him vomiting his interiors, as if throwing up his organs in a vain attempt to get skinnier. I'm seeing his pitiful figure getting a hold of me as he admits his mistake yet does nothing about it.

I don't respond, just stand up from the chair and sit on his bedside. His impossibly weak hand reaches out towards my cheek, caressing it as if he was trying to tell me something. I'm about to shout at him, tears of frustration being blinked back, and tell him that I can't infer what he's trying to say, but I don't. His hands are vibrating, and I grab them, passing my body heat onto his cold palms. He leans in, and we're kissing. His breath was once wonderful, entrancing, tasting of mint, fruit glucose, or alcohol. It has now decayed; stale and sterile, almost odorless. But I ink my lips onto his own anyways, trying to contagiously give them a vivid color; smudge them in a rainbow of life. It's useless.

Would you marry me?

The sound of the ring hitting the floor repeats itself inside my head, corroding my neurons with nerves and the feeling that something is going to go terribly wrong.

“Would you marry me?” the words escape the grasp of my tongue as I murmur them, and the ring still lies on the floor. I'm hugging him too tight, afraid he'll fall fall fall again. I'm frightened, because my embrace might be too strong. Maybe it'll end up pulverizing his un-calcified bones into chalky dust; his white ashes symbolizing a corrupted purity that once belonged to him. It's consuming. Wavering voices in my cranium tell me that his heart can't take it. My fingertips position themselves atop his chest; thud thud thud, there's a heart beneath them. I know now that we can't make this the beginning, but can we not make it the end?

His eyes boring holes into my skull, unblinking, immobile.
A single beeping noise surrounding me.
The static line deafening and numbing.
His fucking bleeding heart couldn't take it anymore.

I stare at him, mouth agape. His lips are still chapped, pale. His eyes… they're so grey and so fucking broken. And I realize that he already fell fell fell, he was drowning in the pits of the ocean, amongst the figures that told him he shouldn't eat. But things can always resurface, they can come back. And maybe the tunnel leading towards salvation wasn't as infinite as I thought it was.

“I–I… I love you, Frank.”

And, maybe, for as long as I can feel his thudding heart beneath my fingers, whether it is for a second or an eternity, we can still try.