There is a hole in my chest.

I thought it was my heart until I realised the pieces were too many to feel anything at all.

It is just a hole. A chasm of memory and regret fighting logic.

There is a little flame inside that flickers pathetically. It’s the confidence of choice, the surety of fact-based decisions, the optimism of possibility, the gratitude for and love of life.

It’s extinguished hourly by the wind of doubt and the rain of sex—to be reignited only by the guilt of my motivation as an alternative to the cold of what actually nightmares in the hole.

There is a hole in my chest.

And perhaps that’s okay for now. Because I’m a master mime. You’ll never know the vertigo I sway with on the edge of my hole. Only, perhaps, when you see my commitment to escaping will you glimpse my darkness. And even then I will convince you to escape with me. I’m a master at that, too.

I’ve been denying reality for years now and have lost faith in the light of truth. Because the truest of truths I’ve learnt hurts more than any falsity.

There is a hole in my chest.

Perhaps I should fill it with being a whore. Maybe my insatiable appetite for jealousy and victimhood based in my lack of physical love would be satiated by anothers’ skin on mine. My most abject anger with society may, in fact, be an anger at the path I inadvertently took. At myself.

The hole in my chest was partly, mostly, completely my own doing—and in a way that I could never control. Perhaps the way to close it is to overflow it with the very things that have opened it. If only I knew where to start.

There is a hole in my chest.

It keeps me awake with its howling. All night it bays unendingly with groans of “perhaps” and self-loathing. It roars my inadequate truth of soul and screams the “could have beens” in a storm of dry tears and plastered smiles. Memories unbidden swarm, and memories bidden fade like sunlight behind clouds, whirling me to dark and fitful sleep.

I wake exhausted, determined to break the cycle of silent, compulsive thoughts, and for a moment I simply watch the sky. And there is peace. But then my mind cracks the sky, and from it flow the demons of unachievable dreams and guilt-ridden desires. And the howling begins again.

There is a hole in my chest.

But every now and again, I love that hole. Because, in the snatched moments between endless ponder and eyelids closed against my mind’s eye, I know that only something significant could have created a hole like this. Only something real and true and powerful. Only something that mattered. Only love.

And if the price of true love is wheezing through a punctured chest for the rest of my life, then so be it. I longed for love. And perhaps I got it. Which makes me scared to long for it again. And yet I do. Quietly, so as to not awake the karma that seems to stalk my quest for love.

There is a hole in my chest.

It’s all that is left of what once was everything. And in time, I know, even that will fade. And that will be the saddest day of all, when I stop hurting entirely. Because then, truly, everything it ever was will be gone.

So, perhaps I cling to that hole. Stretch it and tear it apart even as it begins to heal, because it’s all I have left. And maybe, in a twisted expression of love, a hole of nothing has become better than nothing at all.

There is a hole in my chest.

There is a hole in my chest.

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Author: Andy Charrington

Image: Pexels

Editor: Toby Israel

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