I wish that I could have one face, that people would be able to describe me off-handedly, that’s just Sarah, she has thin lips and delicate hands and brown eyes that stutter if you look at them too long. It’s just that every time my heart breaks I acquire another angle, like a scar that covers my whole body. When my tears dry, I dress to show it off and take it on the town. I want to see what kind of men are drawn to me, because this tells me the damage done.

You can only see my heart from one angle. In seventh grade a pack of girls discovered it and sent me home in tears. All night I stood in front of the mirror, turning this way and that, until I was sure that I could hide it from everyone. Since then nobody has seen it but me, and I can hardly find it anymore. Once I couldn’t find it for several hours and I thought I had lost it for good, and I started panicking until I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a TV screen and saw my heart staring back at me. I stood stock still, which hurt because my back was crooked and my neck started to ache, until I had committed it to memory.

Sometimes I wonder if I only had one angle when I was born. I imagine myself as a baby, my head limp, my mouth gaping and my fingernails so tiny and so perfect. My mother lifts me into her arms and cradles me into her bosom, and my skin is still raw from the shock of its first brush with dryness. My eyes are too young to focus but they search for her anyway, my gaze desperately slipping across her face. Finally, maybe, I catch a glimpse of her as she’s looking at me and she sees me wholly.  She frowns to herself, just a little one, and I crack like a mirror right down the middle.

Women come and jog with me, in ones and twos, but the air tastes glorious so I chase it and finally only one can keep up with me.  We race each other until we are panting, and her looks at me grow darker until she runs down a different path and now I race myself.  By now I feel the press of the road up against me, demanding more before it will release my feet.  With each stride it takes something from me, a bit of handsomeness here, a memory there, until I begin to wonder what there is left of me to take.  My heart is beating like a siren now.  All around me I can feel my skin grow wrinkled and brittle, and as my legs pump my ankles creak and my hips feel more and more fragile every time my feet hit the ground.  The wind blows over my head and takes great fistfuls of hair with it until only gray wisps are left around my temples.  My lungs ache, my side aches, my body aches but my heart is screaming faster.  Faster.  Faster.

(from my dream journal)