heartbeats hurt

he’d been feeling out of place all week long. Something felt out of place, like somebody had switched all of her effects on her desk out with similar but off-color replicas. Like her laundry had been done for her without her knowledge. A small irksome feeling that permeated her every movement: something was wrong and she had somehow been violated.

Not even her favorite movie Stop Making Sense could cure this feeling of violation. She had watched this as a child with her parents every friday night. She had learned to sing along. She had screamed in excitement when “Once In A Lifetime” came on, the synth levelling out. She watched Stop Making Sense on Friday, the same day as her parents annual day of viewing. She poured the last of a glass of wine into her mouth as “Once In A Lifetime” came on, and still felt violated. In fact, she hardly noticed the song actually coming on. She used to call it “Same As It Ever Was” and would yell at her parents to play it in the car.

What the fuck is going on? she thought to herself. She had just accepted an internship at a middle school some thirty minutes away. She knew this was the root of her troubles. She knew it and yet she couldn’t say that it was. She was going to be caretaker of a group of 7th graders. She couldn’t say that they were what caused her anxiety. No, she thought as she opened a new bottle, I don’t quite understand what’s wrong.

But she knew, oh she knew. It was those kids that freaked her out. 30 little assholes per class. 180 per day; 6 periods of class. 180 little assholes in her classroom, making trouble. And she didn’t even mind if they mouthed off. Hell, she wished they would say the fuck word. No, what got to her was the fact that they probably wouldn’t say the fuck word. That they would probably sit there quiet and expectant and that they would tell their parents if their teacher was weird and that she’d have those quiet awful conversations in the staff room with those other teachers. She didn’t even want to be a teacher. Did she? She didn’t. She burned through the bottle. It was $20 wine that she couldn’t really afford but did she care? She didn’t care. She needed something like this because she realized that this was it, she couldn’t drink this bottle of wine and stagger into class the next day like she could here in college. She couldn’t ever do this kind of shit again. And for that reason she let her laundry pile up and forgot to get out of bed somedays. It was only a week but it felt like a lifetime. It was a very quick descent.

She realized, near the end of the movie, around “Cities”, the bonus song, that she’d missed when “Same As It Ever Was” had come on. She was well into her third bottle. Disgusted with the way the evening had turned out, she turned off the television. She sat alone in the dark. She thought bitterly about her life, the hand she’d been dealt, and about the starving children across the world. She began to cry on account of the starving children. She was very drunk. She was normally a two bottle kind of person, which meant she might have a drinking problem, but normally it was well maintained. She felt silly enough crying for those starving children, but then she started to think about herself and her own childhood and she began to cry about that. And to top it all off, she started to sing “Once In A Lifetime” to herself. And as she sang, “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down” she felt very strongly that the kids in her class would find her beautiful, valiant, interesting, and bold.