The Burn In My Heart

 

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Life is full of unexpected events. We all experience pain simply because we are alive. There is pain one can feel for themselves and then there is the kind of pain that is second hand. This is the worst kind, it is a wrecking ball that smashes into you at any moment of any day. To love someone and watch them suffer or lose them, is the ultimate pain.I was straightening my hair. I remember the smeared handprints on the mirror that tried to clear away the steam from my shower a few minutes earlier. I remember smelling the heat as my hair was pressed between the two plates of the iron. It was almost like the scent of burnt toast except with more of a foul aroma to it. I remember hearing the floor creak as I swayed back and forth with a brush in one hand and iron in the other. The familiarity of this morning was suddenly ripped apart by the news I had been dreading for months. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t hear the floor boards; I couldn’t see myself in the mirror. I suddenly wasn’t there anymore; it was if I had disappeared into oblivion. I was sitting in the same room I was before, however I was now watching myself slowly die inside. I was no longer there, my senses were gone and I was in an out of body experience. I became a passenger on a sinking ship with no life rafts left. I was going down and I knew there was nothing to be done about it. I could feel the water rising and I could taste the salt in my mouth. Just as I felt like I was taking my last breathe it stopped all at once. It’s a feeling that even the most advanced and articulate vocabulary could not accurately describe. I regained all my senses. I now smelt the burning floor tiles from where I dropped the iron. I now tasted the salt from the tears streaming down my cheeks and I now saw myself in the mirror. I picked up my iron and removed the clip from my hair to finish straightening it. She was gone.