"Two weeks ago I hardly felt anything," I say, confident in my abilities to understand his procedure. "Why should this one hurt any more?"
"Well, to put it simply, she's just still holding on." He peered into me carefully, watching himself to be sure that he didn't disturb anything else inside. It had been a process, and the appointments were strung out for almost a year. The strands he cut had been built so tediously, so carefully, over minutes and hours and trips to McDonald's. The procedure cost a fortune but still cost me less than I had wasted building the strands. You don't know, when you're creating heart strings, that you're building a fortress around yourself, around your soft parts, your ability to love anything else. The heartstrings are selfish--they pulse blood, thoughts, and emotions towards one source only, and leave the rest of your previous interests neglected. It wasn't until these piece began to die that I started to lose strength as well.
"Oh," I whispered, feeling the sensation in my chest. He rubbed his tool against the string.
"Yep, that's it. That's the one. A big guy, really--maybe the biggest I've ever seen!" He took it under his finger. "Look, it's so sturdy. I thought it'd be more fragile, that I'd have to be more careful. Looks like this one is years in the making! It's like it's part of you. Are you sure..?"
"Yes, I'm sure." My breath echoes in my head, and I can hear my blood rushing in great thumps with my heart, my tongue falling into the back of my throat to keep me from protesting. Everything in me wanted to scream, "No, please, no, I've changed my mind," but my thoughts took me racing back to everything that had happened and the pain, the endless pain that tormented my insides and forced food out of me, made me feel worthless and alone, pressed me up against nails that tore through my skin. No, I couldn't protest. I had waited far too long, and without this cut, I wouldn't be able to sustain the new and more inclusive strings my body had been working on. "It's gotta go," I affirmed, "It's not the right one. It's killing me."
The doctor never put me under for these types of procedures, but sometimes he gave me something to calm my pain or my nerves. "Not today," I motioned when he tried to hand me the bottle, "I think I'm going to want to remember how this feels." He looked at me with both concern and understanding, and stretched a new pair of latex gloves on. It seemed like such a strange environment for such a life-altering decision. White walls, grey cabinets, a metal sink next to the enormous bottle of sanitizer. His baby blue scrubs contrasted against the rest of the room, and he pointed the floodlight down on me like they do at the dentist. He knew not to make too much conversation with his patients. His work was far too painful for distraction, and he knew that the pain would be over as soon as his job was done. Today, especially, I felt that the job couldn't be rushed more. My last appointment. "Alright, here we go." He drew my attention back to the light, back to myself, and with the first touch of the string, into myself and my emotions.
Getting your heartstrings cut isn't something people normally opt to do. Heartstrings are normal and healthy ties to the people you love, they motivate you, give you support, and carry you when you're falling. It's when they start to build too strong, stronger than your heart or your brain, or too many to control, that they become intrusive. I still remember the day of my first exam. "Diseased," he told me. "Like a parasite. Your body has fallen completely subject to the will of these bonds." My heart ached in me, and it was so much more than heartbreak, so much more than disappointment. "We can take care of it, but it'll take time. Your brain isn't even functioning properly on its own, and I'm frankly surprised you're here right now. I advise that we start operating as soon as possible, to prevent any more attachment. You've come late, but in time to prevent further damage."
The procedures were always harder than I imagined, but they got easier every time. After the first heartstring was cut, I held its fragmented body in my hands and sobbed for hours, feeling like I had deserted myself, like I'd deserted her. It wilted away with time like a weed, losing its spring and coloration. I wanted to bring it back to life, prodding it, but once it was cut, I knew I couldn't reconstruct it. I held onto the strings that were left behind, but with every procedure, I felt my heart feel lighter. I started to sing and laugh, my brain began to wander into corners it had left alone for so long, gave her a rest. I felt goals coming to life, my ambitions moving forward. It was clear that the surgeries, though so tedious and long, were necessary. The doctor tried to prevent regrowths of the same threads if he could, removing potentially harmful bonds in their infancy.
I flashed back to the present, and let out a small cry as he began to cut. I always cried. The tears ran down my face, hot and wet, stinging the cut I had earlier bitten into my lip. Every thread of a heartstring contained a memory, and the emotions that interacted so closely with these memories flooded into my reality. Memories of our laughs, of our goals, our ambitions. The night I lay and cried on the pillow next to her, breathing out sighs of regret. She's gone, I reminded myself, that's over. She's left now. But still, my love poured into me as he plucked the string and my lungs filled with air as my body began to shake in sobs. I remembered the day we sat in the grass together, the autumn leaves fell from the trees, and I told her, I'm scared, and she took my hand and smiled. I remember the secret notes on the leaves that I found stowed away so many years later. I remember all the pain of being apart, and I remember the relief I felt when we came back together. I could only counteract the pain with anger, with the thought of her carelessness and betrayal, misunderstandings. Those strings had been snipped months before, the strings of the fighting, but the memories still remained. "We can't mess with your past," he had told me, "We're only here in the present and we can only look forward to the future!" His optimism made me sick.
This string, though, the string with all the love and all the firsts, the string with the hugs and the "you too?"s and the days spent just us, this string was the hardest. We both knew it would be. It seemed a twin string, found in two bodies, and the cutting never made that easier. I wondered how I could be so terribly angry and so broken at the same time. People always tell me that you need to be broken before you can heal, no rain no flowers, no pain no game. I didn't know, I didn't fully know if this would work. But the pressure in my chest was too much, and she kept leaving, and I kept hurting, the strings pulling on my heart and making my skin sore. The stretching doesn't make it more flexible; it leaves it bruised and torn, pulls at it and irritates it. The lining becomes thinner, and you become more vulnerable to fatal situations, times when you might not make it through something that an ordinary person would walk through without a scratch. I knew, when he was cutting it, I knew it had to be done, I knew she'd already forgotten hers, that she left me--
*Snap.* My body filled with a breath that lit me to my toes. "Done," he said cheerfully as the light's reflection burned into my eyes. "You know the drill, now. This recovery will be more difficult than the others, because it was a bigger procedure. Just make sure you rest it up, detach yourself, and remember that you'll probably feel a great deal of sadness the next couple days." He handed me a bottle of anti-depressants. "You're going to need these. I've never seen a case like this. Just remember, that you've done the right thing. Don't fall into the trap of regret, and don't go back to the source. Hold on to the memories and try to forget."
"I know," I told him, my eyes filling with tears. "I'll try my best."
