Tick
The clock in the kitchen screams at me through the quiet. Tick.
I sort my emails because categories make sense. I re-arrange the salt, bananas, and paper towels because I propagate structure. I compose paragraphs in my head because I make the things I need. Tick. I alphabetize my thoughts and count supraventricular tachycardias and bradycardic episodes. They’re equations that can be worked forward and backward to arrive at exactly the correct answer. Tick.
My to-do list devours my home screen. I have to schedule our winter extermination service so Dianne will stop emailing me. I have to renew our waste removal service and decide if we really want to haul recycling bins down our fourth of a mile driveway. I have to research what kind of pine trees will keep the neighbor’s lights from shining directly into our windows. I make sure my Dashlane password is written where everyone will find it. Tick.
I’m not finished with my kids yet. Tick. My heart. Tick.
My husband. Tick. My heart. Tick.
I create symmetry where there is none. I shave my big toes because I’m not dying with hairy toes. Tick.
Aunt Nellie once told my mom to worry about me more. The story is always told with a vague sense of certainty. My brother, Dane, who bravely climbed out of his crib and then back in again, who courageously breached locked doors, and who strode with certainty to all places hidden and off limits, was not the one to worry over. I was. Tick.
I wonder what about three-year-old me made Aunt Nellie think I would be the victim of sudden, radical, and irrational change. Everything that comes together ultimately falls apart, not just me. It’s unavoidable. I wonder why entropy would be after me specifically. Why would my particles be any different from anyone else’s? Tick.
Aunt Nellie told my mom that I would need to be prepared. Was I going to come apart at an unprecedented rate or in some way that seemed worthy of special warning? Would I violate the laws of physics? Did she know I could be inoculated against random agony? Did she think there would come a night when I would be only what I created, and the rest would just be moonshine off the cosmos? Did she think I was just a tenderness swollen with injury? Tick.
Thanks to my early Catholic training I chased futile rather than useful things during coming apart times. It’s human failing to not realize the power we have over our own lives. Tick.
I occupy a finite space in this infinitely temporary world. I’ve spent decades undoing the effects of other people’s obsession by inventing a way to reach some better version of it. Nothing is more tedious than looking for meaning where there is none. Tick.
I used to be lulled to sleep at night by my grandma’s obsession with a god. I remember the monotonous prattle of evangelical radio endlessly forecasting the end, spouting supposedly true world theories meant to dull the pain of existence. This kind of pain was meant to be felt, not dulled with theistic morphine. My grandma wanted assurances, more and more assurances. But every time she thought she had found a new one, old ideas collapsed around her. Mortality was a means to an end for her, a steppingstone to a kingdom of higher existence. The mark of the beast lost its hold on me sometime around the third failed apocalypse. I still ponder how someone could predict my damnation. She placed far too much of her childish hope on me. She pressed herself into my skin. She wove herself into my hair. I swallowed her and held her deep within, until she came up in one huge, satisfying regurgitation. She made me want to scream. I wonder why I didn’t. Tick.
A sudden, nervy energy quivers my heart. I think of the decade of narcotics I took for stage four endometriosis. I puke up that entire decade along with the mark of the beast. But I’m a civilized human so I keep my quivering on paper. I live between all things, in the spaces left open and unattended, where etiological myths die because mundane solutions suffice. I breathe out through my mouth and exhale a bony sigh. I am trusted with breakable things. I have to focus. I chart my events. I check boxes. Palpitations. Shortness of breath. Dizziness. Nausea. Chest discomfort. Tick.
Several days ago, my blood flowed blue and red on the echocardiogram, through the chambers of my heart, leaving trails like meteors streaming through the night sky. Even if the constituent parts of me, the cells that line the chambers of my heart, the DNA that sang me into existence, and the strength that once coursed through my veins could reconstitute themselves, my heart wouldn’t notice. It would still offer up extra, off-time beats in its electrical confusion. Even if my blood could flow backwards, fluttering up my parchment paper valves, I would not resemble any of my previous states. Tick. My sinus node would remain unbothered and unbossed. For every fully ordered state of molecules there are so very many disordered states. Disorder is not a mistake or a punishment or something to pray over. Order is just temporary and hard to maintain. Tick.
I take in free energy, use it to do my most important work, and then return it to the world in disordered form. I burn down the past, sorting the piles of relationship ash behind me. I know its relationship ash because relationship ash is entirely different. It’s full of the remnants of my wildfire anger, my monstrous sighing, other people’s ulcerous battles, the unintentional and intentional impacts of other people’s neuroses, and all of the times people didn’t know how to put themselves out when they were on fire. We burn for a short time, bright and hot, which feels both outrageous and perfectly logical. Tick.
I can’t tell if this is a moment or a state, right before equilibrium. I cannot discern if I’m a sudden flicker or a pile of dying coals. Tick.
Clausius was right; nature extracts payment. The arrow of time points to the past. Tick.
Maybe my heart has always been breaking. Tick.
I don’t know why I thought all death could be properly mourned with generous time and space. Tick.
The clock in the kitchen screams at me through the quiet.
-Melissa Mulvihill
Melissa writes about finding things in places she thought were empty. Her poems and essays can be found at Prometheus Dreaming, The Feminine Collective, The Write Launch, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and Impspired. She's a frequent contributor at The Blue Nib and her poems are anthologized at The Poet's Haven Digest. Her poem, Your Phone Call, was selected for The Blue Nib 2017 Anthology. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A. in psychology and from John Carroll University with an M.A. in counseling.