heart attack jonathan bitz I am having a heart attack. I think this is it. I am lying on the floor, with nobody around. I am frozen in that space where pure terror meets exalted joy. I am paralyzed somewhere in-between a scream and a song. Instead of words, only dry air is whistling out of my mouth. In this ice man pose, I am thinking about Timothy Leary. On his death bed. How they rolled it out onto the patio of his California home. To see the day he died. I, unlike Leary, am on pause. I, unlike Leary, have no one around to wheel me out into the day; to watch me die. From the top of my buzzing skull, all the way down – I am paralyzed and shaking. And, I am staring at the phone. But I can’t reach it. I think this is it. I think that I am dying. + The cab had arrived downstairs. I was scampering around the bathroom – the phone cradled in the crook of my neck. I was looking for Cadence’s contact lens. On flat surfaces. The sink. The floor. The tub. Then Cadence said, it’s in my eye. Maybe it rolled to the back. But I can see it now. I paused. Seeing something on your eye isn’t something that seems to make sense to me. I looked up and Cadence was looking into the mirror. She is my girlfriend. I am her boyfriend. We live together. We have agreed that we should die together. Certainly, we should be able to find something right in front of us, together. + I knew this would happen. I am having a heart attack. Alone on the floor. Staring at the phone, I am one arm length short. Laying on my back and I am thinking, not about my death – but something else, in slow-motion reverse: I have always been in search of that hopeless dream which says every one is like me. If not that, then I have always sought that illusory yoke which at least binds us all together, man and animal, plant and sea. I've heard others talk about it. Call it God and energy and make clarifications that really it's all the same thing. But through all the postulations, this elusive glue – this habitual simulator - has never been anything more than elusive. As a result, I walk the streets in disguise, as a prostitute, seeking company for money. Money for company. In an effort to find a cure for this ill, I have sought counsel. And all the judges have pushed me into books. Where there, I have stared strongly into the throngs of faces that preceded me. To the fathers of psychology, philosophy and the foremost men of words and letters. Alas I found only false prophets fallen from the sky. Pins and needles and pricks to the eye. This is my hurt: That sordid little fact that we are not one, but many and divided. I am frozen. And all my discontents are jammed behind my eyes. Swirling around. I am paused in my paralysis. The wet pain shooting up and into my jaw, down my arm – through my chest and past that place where my heart is stuck on a beat. I am having a heart attack. + Cadence says that the cab is downstairs. That the meter is running. With her finger in her eye, she says to go down there, so he won’t leave. Standing on the other side of the threshold, I am looking imploringly at her. Only two arm lengths away and she feels like an apparition, floating on an opposing, vacant shore across a great sea. That one between you and me. She says, I got it. There it is. On my eye. There it is. I can see it. Can’t you? I lean into the mirror, to turn-in for a glance. And yes, there is her contact, on her eye. But why can’t she get it? She is pulling at the contact. I can see it flexing away from her eye. Somehow it is suction-sealed-shut onto her eye. Cadence says, go. Down. I’ll be there. I almost got it. + I always thought about this moment. This exact situation. I always felt that death would come fast. Without warning. Either that or, I would have some terrible time to lay here, near-death, staring straight at the phone. Unable to pick it up and call those that I love. Say goodbye. And now, I have just fallen in love with a girl who paints naked pictures of her body. Her lips are red. She purses them when I talk, just before she leans in, as if to say: shhh... For less than a month now it has been the one of the most perfect storms I have ever seen from the inside. I am in love. And now I can’t say goodbye. I can’t think of a worse way to go. + Cadence has me waiting in the cab, the meter ticking and rolling over. Here, the world is mimicking the anxiety in my belly. Then, from around the corner she comes. Bouncing with a smile on her face. From the inside, I open the door and tell the driver, there she is. Cadence falls into the seat next to me. The door shuts and the driver knows where to go. Cadence says, you won’t believe it. She says, the contact was on the toilet seat. Right there, in front of her the whole time. The contact wasn’t in my eye at all. She says that it was right there. In front of us both, the whole time. In the end, what Cadence was really stretching away from her eye was not a contact lens, it was the membrane of her cornea. I cringe and my chest swirled with unnamable, nauseating forces. The whole time, right in front of us both, Cadence wasn’t pulling at a stubborn contact lens. No, she was trying to rip out the front of her eye. + I was always warned about our family’s history of heart conditions. But I always thought they were talking about love. And heart-shaped balloons drawn at the bottom of notes and cards, sitting under a vase of flowers; waiting for the beloved to arrive. I think this is how my grandfather died: Of a heart attack. Because he wasn’t loved in return. All alone under the call of Code Blue in some white hospital while my father wasn’t in the red room. All alone. And in love. I never met my grandfather. I didn’t make it much further with Cadence either. And thankfully so because, I wouldn’t be having this heart attack if we would have stayed together. For the last month I have been affected by this painter girl that is in love with the color red. And now more love has come. And now my body does not know what to do with it. I feel my insides trying to expel it. Quell it. Sell it to the unfeeling cosmos. I am on the ground, grinding in frozen pain, longing, wishing – that the dream were more powerful than the world. For weeks now I have fallen asleep at night, wishing that the world would turn over and that place where great and triumphant love binds us together would conquer everything passive and unfeeling. I am in love. I am paused, in paralysis. I am having a heart attack. I need to pick up the phone and say goodbye before I die.