“do you ever get tired of fixing hearts?” i said, in a playful tone.
his eyes flickered toward me, as he lifted his eyebrows. “what do you mean?”
“you fix them all day and all night,” i stated softly, “don’t you ever get tired of seeing how fragile they are?”
he chuckled, though it was a quiet, reflective sound. “i’m not fixing them,” he replied, “i’m simply reminding them how to beat again.”
the way he uttered those words, without a doubt and pause, made my pulse falter.
i should have known then.
i should have known then.
i knew it the moment his words sank in, somewhere deep inside me, somewhere between my ribs and refused to leave. i lingered. i stayed. it wasn’t just a conversation it was more like a verdict and i realize i was already asymptomatic.
it began with arrhythmia.
and believe me it wasn’t the kind of feeling you could measure or study in the text books; and it’s not either the type that you could diagnose by measuring my pulse rate nor checking the electrical activities of my heart. it was the kind that showed up the first time he looked at me like i was something worth understanding; so i stayed.
for years, my heart had spent years learning to beat in quiet and stable rhythms, suddenly it couldn’t remember the pattern. it skipped. it stuttered. it fired out of sequence.
it lost its rhythm.
premature beats, he would say, but that was a different story, from a different time. i considered it. maybe in another context, in another life.
but this wasn’t another life. this was one where i sat across from him watching him wrap his hands around an extra hot triple shot of espresso while drinking my iced mont blanc coffee and eating a pistachio croissant, and a sense of realisation creep up on me. at first, it was slow, but then it hit me all at once, i was in trouble. i was already in trouble.
he told me once, in that quiet voice he saves for things he believes deeply, that the heart isn’t romantic. that it’s only a muscle. that it contracts and relaxes based on electrical impulses and nothing more.
i nodded quietly. i agreed.
i didn’t tell him that every single time he picks me up in the middle of the lonsdale court, my heart fires off by itself. firing without permission. contracting around something it has no right to hold onto.
i didn’t tell him i have learned the precise weight of his hand on top of mine. the way he plays my hair with his fingers when he senses something is bothering me.
i always believe that things are lost once they are spoken, and i wasn’t ready to lose him to the truth.
but here i am writing, continuing the story that i have written; it turns out, the truth wasn’t mine to protect.
it was his. it belonged to him; and he had been protecting it long before i ever arrived.
i was helping him to study. that was our thing. one of the small, mundane moments i had collected and kept without telling him how much they meant to me.
what is the most common cause of—
no, say it like this—
i know, i know, just answer the question—
that was us. that was the thing we did. it was small and it was ours and i loved it completely.
i loved being the one who helped him prepare for something important. i loved that he let me into that part of his life. it felt like being chosen for something specific.
and to emphasise this, i am not usually the type of person who would try to check someone else’s messages because i respect privacy.
but that afternoon. something moved in me.
i don’t know. something instinctive and i don’t know how to explain it. you know how the way the body sometimes knows before the mind does —
something said look.
and i looked.
his laptop was open, he was sitting in front of me but i’m still verbalising the questions but there’s this tension inside me, this instinct i had never had before and couldn’t justify. and i opened his imessages.
i don’t know why.
i knew why.
i hope i didn’t.
there’s a hesitation, a shift, a fraction of a second where something in him was somewhere else. i could not name it. just the way a heart sometimes feels a change in pressure before the storm arrives.
i opened his messages.
and there it was.
and there it was.
and believe me, i want to describe what it felt like but even i speak four languages i couldn’t.
it wasn’t like being stabbed multiple times. that metaphor couldn’t justify what i felt. that metaphor is too fast, too clean and too kind.
it feels like watching the floor you are standing on slowly, silently, become something other than floor. no single moment of rupture.
no single moment of rupture.
just the gradual, nauseating understanding that the ground you have been trusting with your entire weight was always something different than what it appeared.
the messages were just there.
the messages were just there.
my hands started shaking. i couldn’t breathe. no words can fathom what i’ve felt during that moment.
i am not a person who shakes. people around me would tell that i always hold things dearly, steadily, who can keep the tremor internal where it can’t be heard and seen. but my hands are shaking. dear lord, they didn’t ask for my permission. they just started. uncontrollable tremor that moved from my fingertips inward and couldn’t stop. i couldn’t stop. it didn’t stop.
what are the risk factors for — and i tried to breathe like someone who was fine.
i was not fine.
i was not fine.
he looked at me.
and i think he saw my hands before he saw my face, because his own expression changed before i’d even raised my eyes to his.
he knew.
did you ever lie to me?
do you really love me?
it wasn’t a lie he told once. it’s not a single lie.
and it keeps coming back to me. trust me, believe me when i say a single lie i could have understood. a single lie has a shape, a moment of origin you can locate, think of, rationalise and examine.
for eight months.
for eight fucking months.
it was a sustained deception.
the kind that requires consistency. i know he’s a capricorn so he is disciplined and it’s a certain kind of discipline. and it takes more effort than the truth would have. he had to remember what he told me. he had to plan and organise things so he can keep betraying me. he had to manage the edges where the two things might touch. he had to be two temperatures at once and make sure neither one bled into the other.
i told him all my traumas. but he had done it perfectly anyway.
dear lord, i remember again the previous betrayals of happiness.
dear lord, he had done it. quietly. cleanly. for longer than i knew.
he mastered cardiology, and he understood it perfectly better than anyone around me, that you can run two rhythms simultaneously, as long as you keep them from interfering with each other, no monitor will catch it. you will not hear an alarm sound. everything will be stable since he knew the science of it. he applied it.
one afternoon, while we are eating our favourite fried bangus and tortang talong, he is giving me tips on how to read ecg and he said the heart dislikes unpredictability. that it thrives on rhythm, on consistency.
omnipotent god, i gave him that.
i gave him the most open, tamed, honest, devoted, raw, genuine version of myself i had ever offered anyone.
i just needed it to be real.
and still; i was still the variable.
omniscient god, why do i always end up being an anomaly. i was the reading that didn’t fit the chart, that his heart produced for a while and then; quietly, carefully always being corrected for.
i can only hear the silence. the particular silence of two people who have just run out of a particular kind of pretending.
it stopped the way a rhythm stops.
not with noise.
with absence.
i can feel indifference.
one beat. and then the silence where the next one should have been.
asystole.
flatline.
omnipresent god, i wish i had a clean flatline. a clean flatline is merciful in its honesty. it can somehow give you a timestamp. it can give you an ending you can hold. what i got was pulseless electrical activity. the heart still firing. still depolarising around the shape of something that is no longer there. no longer there. still sending electrical impulses into a body with nothing left to deliver them to.
dear lord, this was the most devastating rhythm that you’ve given to me. the one that looks, from the outside, almost like living.
almost alive.
still trying.
but then again, the heart can repair itself.
the heart has a capability to repair itself.
the heart can repair itself.
not quickly. not without leaving evidence. not without the long, private, unglamorous work of continuing when every reasonable part of you would rather not.
but it repairs. it remembers.
starting today, i’m hoping that without asking permission, my heart will decide. without waiting for the conditions to be right. my heart will decide. my heart will decide to beat again.
i hope mine gets there.
not for him.
just for me.
just to feel it —
steady. and mine. and whole.
sinus rhythm restored.
The Stillness Archive 
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