The Girl Without A Heart

One summer day in my first years of primary school, I found myself in the bathroom.  I was washing my hands in the sink, looking at the girl in the mirror.  She was wearing a navy blue and white checked school dress, with her blonde hair falling out of her pony tail around her freckled face.  I felt something caught in my throat.  Grabbing some of the rough, yellow paper towel from the dispensor, I started to try to cough it up.  It didn't take long before I got it and spat it out into the paper towel I was holding.  There it was, a dark, blood-coloured ball sitting in the hollow of the palm of my hand.  I don't know what I had been expecting, but that was definitely not it.  What was it?  What could be that big?  And that colour?  There was only one thing that came to mind: my heart.  I had just coughed up my heart.  But why wasn't I dead?  You can't live without a heart.  Maybe it would just take a while?  That wasn't that important, what was important was that my death was imminent.  I would most likely die that very day.

I was gripped by a nervous fear: I couldn't tell anyone firstly for fear that they would scold me for having been so very foolish as to cough up my own heart, and secondly, in the case that I hadn't actually coughed up my heart, that it was something else, that they would mock me.  The rest of the day and part of the next I spent in quiet anxiety, awaiting the end when death would take me and everyone would realise that I was heartless.  But as the second day stretched into the afternoon it began to cross my mind in waves that maybe I wasn't doomed afterall.  Repeatedly I banished the thought, not wanting to jinx myself, but gradually as the day passed I was immersed in a sense of peace and relief.  I had spent a day heartless and was still alive, this probably wasn't my end, I was probably safe for now, probably...