hello,

last year i took a functional anatomy course. i hadn’t known what it a finite capacity to bleed meant until i had held a human heart in my hands, anemic and grey, meticulously preserved. even 11 months later the memory is nitro bright, fully formed, formaldehyde spilling all over my fingertips.

it terrifies me to think that i have one like it in my ribcage right now. sometimes i feel like it fills my entire body

on the topic of life: i finished my first round of rotations, i bought a car and drove my first solo road trip, i moved away from home and then back in after 3 years, i broke up with the person i’d been with since my first year of uni. i dream of my own memories in flashes sometimes; my first code blue, flatlined on the unit; my last day in the apartment, sweltering summer sun through pale linens; our parting words in perfect recall, sincerity so sharp that i think every cell in me was made to believe it.

on the topic of you: every year i think i’ve outgrown the tortured teenage melodrama that propelled me to start writing these. but this girlhood crush, oscillating on a decade in the making, and every year i still return here, a heart powered by perpetual motion. i always think about love when i write to you. surely that means something, after all these years

love, a