Beats Per Second
Her arms were steady as she lowered the chalkboard to her floor. The smell of storage room told her the math department wouldn’t miss it and the quiet night promised that no one on campus knew it had been taken.
The measurements weren’t exact when she began with the chalk, but like anyone who’d faked their way through a physics lab, she’d learned to estimate. As she worked, Dana pulled up photos on her phone, snippets of past conversations, and muscle memory from her fingers- anything that would offer numbers. Slowly, the outline of a body began to take shape.
Still, she knew two dimensions wasn’t enough. From textbooks to thought experiments, scientists could agree that life needed at least three. To satisfy the requirement of energy consumption and waste excretion, it needed a way to transport material from one end to another. In two dimensional space, this would cut a being in half. So Dana needed layers.
Scavenging around her shoebox dorm, a pile began to form. The flannel he’d given her last summer, a hat from her grandfather that nearly matched the pictures, sweatpants a tad too big, winter socks from the back of her closet.
Dana used them to fill in her rough draft as the memories moved from the muscles in her hands to fill her brain. She remembered the first time he’d been in her room. The first time she’d been in his. Every time after that. His hand on her back when she stumbled down a trail, her palms on his while he lay like a blanket. Kitchens full of debates, halls wandered at lunch. The shape of his nose as he slept. His laugh from tickles. Her front porch with his shoes.
Reminiscing was one thing, but it was the memories neither of them would ever make that kept her up at night.
She locked her eyes on the collage of clothes and smudged chalk so that she couldn’t see the door he would never walk through. She flinched away from the corner of her bed to avoid the duvet he would never sleep under. The chair he would never throw a bag on. The people he would never meet. The words he would never say, never write, never read, never hear. All the space she would pass through that would never dip a little from his gravity.
No.
Dana closed her eyes and stilled. If she squeezed them, the flannel beneath her fingers could be any other shirt, not a missing chest that refused to rise and fall. Maybe she could press them tight enough to fool her nerves and feel his lungs expanding.
It was all electricity anyways. Synapses firing in chain reactions up her arms and legs. If she could only convince her fingers he was there-
She couldn’t. Trying and trying harder, clenching her eyelashes into her cheeks like sutures, the static silence was too much. A sob stuttered up her throat as she stumbled back, tripping over her bed and flailing away from it into the wall.
Pressing into the cream paint, it smudged tear streaks to cool her face. Chills seeped in and she thought of snowflakes she would never see in his hair, winter winds that would never force their hands into each other’s pockets. Boots he’d never stomp off outside her door, storms they wouldn’t sleep through together, frozen toes they wouldn’t press to each others’ calves..
All that was left of her was missing people.
Just as fast, Dana shoved away from the wall, away from the cold she was alone with. It needed sound. The walls needed to catch his voice, the floor needed his footfalls. Even as her own ribs held racing muscles, the room was hollow. One heartbeat wasn’t enough.
Trembling violently, it took four attempts to open her saxophone case before she managed to remove the metronome. Drawing on lessons from high school health class, she set it to 75 beats per minute before tucking it into a pillow and buttoning the flannel over it. A gentle tick, tick, tick thickened the air and her breaths grew less shallow.
Laying down beside the figure she’d created, Dana rested a hand across the artificial chest as she fell into sleep. Somewhere between dreams, memories and delusion, he asked if she was awake. She hadn’t been since she’d gotten the text, but she hadn’t slept either.
Call it sleep deprivation, call it a lost mind- she felt the ghost of an arm pull her closer and knew there was nothing she wouldn’t do to give the pile on her floor a pulse.
