"Mom, it hurts so bad."
It hurts so, so bad. My chest had shattered into a million pieces all scattered around me like I fell through a window. Plummeting so fast, I felt like Icarus.
"You'll be okay."
"How do you stop it?"
"You shouldn't have punched the wall."
"But I loved her."
"Love hurts, Percy."
I was eleven years old and I had a crush on my next door neighbor. She was friends with my mother and she'd come over to my house and I'd stare at her all the time when she wasn't looking. And I knew that I wanted to marry her. Only if she'd wait for me to grow up and we could live together and fill up her empty house. And I remember her sad empty eyes every time she came out to the porch to smoke cigarettes. My tiny heart was just one poisoned vessel in a pack of Redwoods.
She had poisoned me. I loved her so much but she never paid me much attention and that was equivalent to downing a glass full of mercury. Oh, neither God nor Venus could compare to how beautiful she was. Every evening I would sneak behind her house and look through the hole in her fence right up to her bedroom window and see her undo the strap of her bra and I'd see her bare back and I'd fall in love with her even more.
I dreamt about her every night until a man came. He came at night and kissed her right at her front door and she'd always invite him inside and I got so angry. I got so angry that I punched my bedroom wall and cried so hard I thought I was going to die.
"It hurt so bad, mom."
"What? Your hand or your heart?"
My heart. My heart hurt so bad. I had to go to the hospital and let my hand heal and eventually it did, but that X-ray never examined my heart. They never checked my chest to make sure it wasn't hurting. They never asked me. They never cared. And the night I came back I ran all the way up to her front door and she answered it with her boyfriend who was so tall. I told him that I hated him more than anything in the world and I told her that I wanted us to get married and I thought she was even more beautiful than Aphrodite or even Apollo. She tried to touch my face but I bit her and I ran back to my house and locked myself in my room and cried and suffocated and dreamt that I was a bee trapped in a jar repeatedly battering my useless body against the glass. And I prayed and prayed to Jesus Christ that I would fall asleep and wake up in the desert because I had never been to the desert and I would live alone amongst the cacti and sagebrush because the desert doesn't have potential. Nothing can be or will ever be in the desert. Nothing can be or will ever be of me.