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Love is a feeling.
It’s not a fact, something you can merely put faith in or can trust. You couldn’t just believe in love. It had to be experienced; you had to feel it in your gut down to the tips of your fingers.
Mike Wheeler knows it’s a feeling because one day three years ago his heart skipped a beat and he’s been waiting for it to pick back up ever since.
People always say corny shit like “my heart is beating outside of my chest” or “it’s beating so fast right now. Can you feel it?” The thing is, Mike’s heartrate is slow. Unhurried, like it’s in no rush to beat outside of his chest — it’s comfortable where it is. It’s stable.
It sounds kind of stupid, and he doesn’t dare give voice to the thought, but he thinks it might be because of her — El, who has enough power flowing through her veins for two. There’s enough love in her that he doesn’t need to worry about his heart ever stopping. As long as she’s alive, as long as he has her, it’ll beat.
Feelings are temporary — he knows this for a fact. Anger is fleeting. Sadness won’t last forever — but Mike can’t quite wrap his head around the idea of his love for her being anything other than permanent, an anchor. That one instance where his breath caught in his throat a fixed point in time. In any universe his flashlight will find her face in a sea of trees and something will shift.
But anger and sadness are expressions of feelings, emotions brought to the surface of the skin — on your face, in your voice — and he’s not sure how to openly express his love for her without ripping his chest open for her to peek inside, to understand that the steady, slow throb of his heart is telling her everything she needs so he doesn’t have to. He feels so much, and yet he’s not sure how to let any of it surface without hurting himself in the process, like an open wound you refuse to dress.
She has enough love in her body for the both of them; it was ingrained in her before birth. In every flick of her wrist, every press of her lips, every smile. She loves easily, maybe even too much for him sometimes, and Mike isn’t sure how to catch up. He feels like his heart might stop whenever she’s around, and hers beats outside of her chest, powerful and loud and open . She doesn’t have to try.
El doesn’t realize just how terrified he is that the very thing she loves so passionately with could destroy her in a flash and he’d have no choice but to follow suit. He’s been standing by a cliff edge for years. There would be no saving him this time.
That feeling is permanent, too. It’s never left him — The fear that one day he’ll forget how to breathe because she won’t be around to show him how. He won’t know how to exist without her because ever since he’s been able to identify the dull ache in his chest as love he’s felt like there was no other way to be .
His heart will beat out of his chest until it stops, and the people who say that that’s what love is will finally be right. But until that day, until she drifts so far away from him that he can no longer survive on a secondhand pulse, he’s comfortable knowing this is enough.
El has enough power flowing through her veins to last several lifetimes; a hundred years, maybe an eternity. As long as her heart beats, Mike is certain that his will, too, and that feeling — the gentle thump of a heart beneath a chest so burdened with unspoken words — will keep him going until time stops.
Right now, all he needs is to find a way to tell her that everything she’s thinking — That he’s lost interest in the wonder of her , that his love for her will be anything but immortal even after their time is up – is wrong… without desperately carving his heart from his chest as a means of confession.
Can you feel it?