heartfears

by Lane Michael Stanley
Originally Published in The Ana Issue 15

when i proposed to nick it was a surprise, we were moving so i suggested we have appetizers at the old apartment and dinner at the new house, but when we did a final sweep of the apartment to make sure we hadn’t left behind any lost earrings or sheet music or whatever people leave behind, he opened the kitchen cabinet to find a ring box with a lily, and i got down on one knee and i asked him to marry me and he cried and said yes and my best friend drove us to the new house where all our friends and family yelled congratulations!!! and my other best friend played star wars music and nick was shocked and he cried again and even now i can feel in my body how his surprise must have beat his heart like a drum in his chest, but i can’t imagine the pulse anymore without wondering, when his heart stopped beating a few weeks later while he was up late playing video games, was that surprise too much of a strain? did it speed up the time that was already running short? 
.
nick died in january 2016 and now it’s february 2024 and i’ve been hallucinating chest pains, but i don’t quite know if they’re hallucinations or they’re real, but if i don’t quite know then that probably means they aren’t real, but it keeps happening so that’s not nothing and i wonder if i’ve just been drinking too much coffee again.
.
i never had a body that could do things that impressed people but somewhere after a year of daily yoga practice that started to change, and i could twist my body in ways that made people say oh wow. backbends are supposed to open the heart chakra and i have some kind of cheat code in my spine so they come naturally to me, i can plant my feet and hands on the ground and lift my hips toward the ceiling like i’m wracked around a wheel. 
.
it’s february 2 and my partner jess is visiting for opening night of my play in baltimore and i definitely feel something weird in my chest, but maybe i’m just nervous because it’s opening night and it’s always more painful to watch my comedies because sometimes my jokes are stupid? i feel these phantom chest pains more when jess and i are visiting each other (we’re temporarily long distance) but maybe i’m more aware of them because i don’t want him to have to deal with me suddenly dying in the middle of a play, he would be so sad.
.
i feel like i know so many people whose bodies have just suddenly stopped working and they’ve died for no reason, and i want to tell you about the horrible shocks of their deaths, but instead i’ll tell you that she always wore tank tops with chunky necklaces. instead i’ll tell you he had one of those laughs you could hear across a room. 
.
my yoga teacher is a mousy man named mike with thin shoulder-length hair, he always wears a hat and a polo with basketball shorts (not your quintessential yoga teacher). i lift into wheel and he stands in front of my arcing legs and his hands appear at my waist and he says come up, i’ve got you, and i have never heard of this as a thing bodies can do but my core seizes and i let him guide me and i lift my hands up off the ground like i’m floating and i slowly grow forward and upward until somehow i’m standing in front of him, like we’re just meeting for lunch. hi, mike. 
.
it’s february 8 and i have cut back from four to three cups of coffee per day. i have lost some of my natural zest. 
.
where is my heart? whenever i feel one of these weird phantom moments i try to check my heartbeat, but sometimes i can’t find it which is certainly not comforting, but clearly i have a heart beating somewhere because i’m perfectly fine and i can usually find a pulse in my neck so something must be pushing my blood forward. i keep wanting my heart to be up high like halfway to my collarbone but sometimes i can feel it better in my lower ribs. is it moving around? 
.

my tally of sudden friend deaths only counts deaths from bodies giving out, because after nick died i lived in a recovery house in baltimore in the middle of the heroin epidemic, so if i start counting deaths from overdoses, suicides, and shot by police, i can get to twelve in a matter of seconds and then i don’t want to keep going.
.
it’s february 11 and jess and i have a weird emotional spiral that neither of us understands and the next morning we’re both tender and sorry. he calls me on my way to work and i feel something weird in my chest, and i’m scared of dying suddenly at the wheel and taking somebody else out with me so i pull over at a gas station and breathe. i tell him i thought i felt something weird in my chest and he asks if i’m anxious and i say yes and we have a really good talk about how we can do better at just letting the other be sad sometimes so we don’t both freak out when one of us is in a bad mood.
.
i haven’t told jess i might be having heart problems because if he told me that and didn’t immediately go to a doctor i would completely lose my mind and have a meltdown. i periodically like to have minor meltdowns anyway just because i want him to go in for a checkup but it gives him anxiety so he keeps putting it off and every now and then i decide it seems like a good afternoon to get really upset about it and then he usually finds a new gp to call a few days after that, and then they usually aren’t accepting new patients and we get to start the cycle over again. i think he’ll go when i move back to la and i can go with him. he hasn’t seen a doctor in twenty years, except to prescribe his prep, and sometimes he gets scared. 
.
lately when i’ve been lying in meditation at the end of yoga i have this image that dried-out grayish reeds are sticking up out of my heart, like bamboo used to grow there and now it’s calcified and died. i want to pull them out but they won’t go by pulling, it feels like the only way to get them off would be to smack at them and break them but then i’d be left with sharp shards and that seems worse. so i focus my visualizations on the base of the reeds, imagine what it would be to fill hot packed desert with swampy waters, wonder whether these dried-out reeds might become dislodged and float away. 
.
nick was afraid of butterflies because when he was two he fell into a koi pond and the flappy tails on his face made him afraid of flappy things, and then his two younger siblings were afraid of butterflies because they saw big brother was and they thought he must be right. maybe i inherited it too because i go to a butterfly enclosure with my friend and their toddler and they give us little q-tips for the butterflies to land on but when bright blue wings flap over toward me i swerve to avoid them. later one lands on the leg of my jeans but i am cool and collected and kiddo sees it and says to me did one land on your pants??? and i say it did land on my pants and they scream in delight, bowling over with baby laughter on the astroturf.
.
it’s february 17 and i’m visiting jess in los angeles while i do a virtual writing workshop that i feel very fancy and proud of myself for getting into, yay for me, and i have an extra cup of coffee to stay alert and now i definitely feel something, i put my hand on my heart and the beat isn’t missing, it’s right there at the surface and it’s dancing around and this is definitely not normal, i feel a little light-headed but maybe that’s because of the stress, and it passes in a few seconds so that’s good. i keep listening to the lecture, and i knit a few rows of a scarf for my mom.
.
i look up heart palpitations and it describes the little dance my heart just did and it says they’re usually harmless, which is cool because i thought for sure the internet would tell me i was dying. the heart dances can be brought on by caffeine, but also hormone changes. i take a shot of testosterone once a week, does that count as a hormone change? but i’ve been doing that for years. it’s probably the caffeine thing, not the trans thing. either way i should probably stop keeping it to myself now that it has a name. palpitation. 
.

nick’s death was not peaceful, his chair was thrown back behind his desk, he had almost made it to the doorway when i found him (probably on his way to alert me), and days after i found his computer mouse on the other side of the room, like it had been flung there. that’s the most i’ve ever written down about finding his body. maybe i won’t show this to anyone.
.
i finally tell jess about everything and he believes me that i’ll go to the doctor and agrees cutting back on coffee is a good idea and we go to the vegan food trucks by his apartment and the cute boy at the donut truck gives us extra donuts like he always does.
.
it’s february 19 and i’m flying back to the east coast tomorrow and the workshop is over so jess and i get one night of rest together, but i am having heartburn and i don’t know if heartburn is a sign of anything or if i’ve just been eating more gluten than usual, and jess asks if i want to go to urgent care for my peace of mind. i’m more worried about his peace of mind because at least if i died suddenly i wouldn’t have to know about it, but he would know forever. i would prefer not to die though, there are so many nice things like writing in bed and sunshine and watermelon juice and swimming and that little patch of gray in jess’s beard. we stay in and we finally cook the fancy dinner we had planned for valentine’s day and we sleep in our matching pajamas. 
.
the doctor from the la lgbt center calls me just after i land at the newark airport and says i should start tracking my symptoms or when i think i’m having symptoms (because i tell her i might be imagining them), and to go to the emergency room if i have any chest pain or shortness of breath. i’ll move back to la in april (finally) and as soon as i have a return date i should make an appointment for a general checkup to see if it’s just the coffee or if something is wrong.
.
nick was a veteran and a guitar player and he was getting his associates degree in something to do with computers, so he just had the health insurance provided by the va which is famously terrible, so he didn’t go to the doctor very often. i know one time somebody told him he had high cholesterol but he was only 34 when he died so i’m sure he wasn’t worried about it. he didn’t think we’d be finding out about his hypertensive cardiovascular disease from an autopsy report when he was supposed to be planning his wedding. 
.
i thought maybe i shouldn’t write any of this down, because if i wrote down my fears and then i did die maybe that would make it worse for jess, like he should’ve done something. but the doctor told me to and i can’t stop writing this in my head so here it is. jess, if this makes anything worse, i love you and i’m sorry.
.
it’s february 25 and i have hired a crew with grant money i won to make a documentary about two of my friends from the recovery house, two friends who are actually still alive, and on top of that they’ve started a family (more life), opened a tattoo shop/hair salon (purpose), and hold big recovery fundraisers (grace). the cinematographer and i crash on air mattresses at the shop and i can barely take care of myself right now, much less myself plus a cinematographer, so i forget to figure out a lunch plan. we’re in a tiny town on the eastern shore of maryland and i’m a vegan and most things are closed on sundays but i find an indian place that looks promising. when i call, the guy who answers the phone calls me “ma’am” in every sentence (my voice gets me misgendered more in the country than the city), i tell him to stop and he doesn’t and i get more upset, with him but also with myself because i’m being shitty to a person who is clearly speaking english as a second language and it’s probably not his fault but i’m dysregulated from the shoot and i hang up the phone without asking if their vegetable biryani has cheese in it. so i only eat granola bars all day, and i’m interviewing my friends about their biggest traumas and how they’re still standing, and i have an extra cup of coffee to make sure i ask the best questions so i can tell their stories and maybe give somebody out there some hope that people can make it, and we run late so we rush out but i get my cinematographer on his bus back to new york in time, and as i’m leaving the station i definitely, for sure, have another heart palpitation.
.
sometimes when i talk about nick i feel like people hear it as a story about my dead fiance, but what they don’t realize is before he was my dead fiance he was my alive fiance. back then he was just as alive as anybody.
.
jess doesn’t seem to be freaking out, so that’s good. he asks when i’m eating dinner because i told him about the palpitation and the granola bars. i’m on my way to my parents’ house in a suburb of baltimore and they’ve already picked me up a veggie bowl from the vegan restaurant where i worked all through high school and college. they heat it up on their favorite cast iron hot plates when i arrive and we all eat together and i give my mom her scarf and she wears it all through dinner. 
.
i’m standing in front of mousy yoga teacher mike and i think we’re done now that he’s helped me levitate out of wheel, but he says to me you’re going back down and i must give him a face that says that’s impossible because he says i promise you can and he puts his hands back on my waist, and ever since i transitioned i’m not used to straight men touching me without being incredibly awkward anymore so i wonder if i should be uncomfortable for him, but he just places his hands on me with light guidance and i start leaning backward and i put my hands out behind me, i spill backward like water pouring out of a jug and i have to release downward and trust that mike will hold me up until i’m back in wheel again, and i push my heart toward the back wall and i finally lower down to rest. i don’t feel the reeds poking out of my heart today, i feel nice and stretched out and open and i try to feel into the edges of my fingers, the crannies between my toes, the mat below me. i smell the earthy sweetness of palo santo and my eyelids feel the dimming of the studio lights and i remember the first time jess and i went to the park by my house, i brought lunch and the sun shone and we felt the grass between our toes, and now i feel a little green light right in the middle of my chest, soft and wet and precious.
.
i promise to stop drinking so much coffee. 
.
for years after nick died i decided the only death i would never have to mourn was my own so i became more selfish and kept people far from my heart and it was a shitty fucking way to live. 
.
being with jess makes me more scared of dying than i ever was before. but maybe that’s a good thing.
.
nick’s birthday was december 29, and my birthday is april 29, and jess’s birthday is september 29, and this is a year when we have a february 29, and on this day nothing happens with my heart.