Nobody Noticed My Heart Stopped Beating
Not even me. Nobody could tell at first,
because my dead heart stood still inside,
hidden from common sight.
I went on living like I still had a heart,
as if I never needed it.
I can still stand and talk and look human,
only I’m dead inside.
If I had known,
I would have mended my broken heart,
I’d call for help,
I would have rescued me.
It was my husband who noticed first,
he said,
you’ve never been this heartless before,
and he was right,
because he’d taken my beating heart for granted,
like I’d taken it for granted,
like we don’t take care of things we have and think
they’ll last forever.
I carry my dead heart inside,
and I walk heartless among the heartless,
there is a tribe of us,
people whose heart stopped beating and they can’t fix
it and
they pretend they live.
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Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of We Fade With Time and Christmas People by Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as the Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and others. She's the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and the Argyle journals.