Step To My Beat

I've been listening to my heartbeat for hours. Just me, the dark, and my heartbeat. I can feel it pulsating in the space where my ribs meet, I can feel in in my temples, in my fingertips. My vital organ, my built-in clock. Independant of will but dependant on time, it serves as a traffic cop for oxygen, no rest for the ticker. My textbook heart separates blue and red blood, and channels the two colours to their individual destinations, without them even having to ask for directions.
It's been busy for a long time now. It's always been there, almost from the start. Roundabout the time my mother most likely realised that she was pregnant, my heart was already the feature of the show. In proportion to my four-week old body, my heart would have been nine times larger than an adult's heart. No one told it what to do; it has just always been doing what it does best - keeping me alive.
It has been slowed down in deep sleep; those moments where everyone looks as innocent as they once used to be, It's been quickened by narrow escapes, intimate eyecontact, anticipation, emails from strangers, games of hide-and-seek, orgasms, rollercoasters, hockey matches and hidden crushes. It has missed beats, it has done two-steps tangoes, it has turned to ice and has smouldered like fire. But it has kept on beating. Until death do us part - my natural rhythm, my muscular metronome, my heart.