By Andreana Joi Faucette

I’m running from the pain of mundanity as it chases me. I can only hope that my heart does not give out on me before it is too late.

When I was born, the doctors told my mother I had a hole in my heart.

It wasn’t anything serious, just enough to warrant a few tests. It caused my heart to murmur — to beat too fast for my little baby body to handle. My pediatrician told her it would go away with time, that infants’ bodies are surprisingly plastic, and that I would patch the hole up all by myself as I grew.

At twenty-one, I’m not sure this is true. My heartbeat hounds when I run or walk, when I breathe too fast or cry too hard, but most of all when I feel too much, which is all of the time.

At twenty-one, I’ve begun to wonder whether that infant-sized hole in my heart ever mended itself, or if it’s only grown larger with age, ripping at the seams with every heartache.

Seven years ago, I began writing everything down, convinced this was how I would discover the beauty — or meaning, or something of the sort — in these feelings that threaten to rip the breath from my lungs and tear me apart from the inside out. It ruined me when I let it fester, so I let the feelings pass through ink or graphite, drawing endless spirals when words wouldn’t come to mind.

It’s an obsessive search; I’ll observe every detail and afford the wrong words to all of it. I lose myself in the blurred lines of what is real life and art — what is truth, like what is beautiful, is muddled in the eye of the beholder. Frustrated that I may never win the game that is writing, I keep my hand close to my chest, committing these rules to memory.

The nasty truth behind all of the pristinely polished prose is a girl who has fallen apart too many times to be put back together. So I perpetually chase a conclusion to my story, a forever-goal that remains elusive as a lighthouse on the horizon. Once I had written it down, I felt I would experience it and feel whole again — mended — in mind, then in heart. But as I swam towards it, it only retreated further from me.

I grabbed hold of every fragmented feeling, writing it down in midnight-black ballpoint ink onto whatever paper within my reach: the reverse of a two-week-old boarding pass, a napkin marred by the ring of condensation from last night’s drink, or my favorite notepad if I was lucky, but —

It’s still not enough. At the end of the day, I’m left hungry, and my story aches for its conclusion.

So I continued saying yes to things — dates, impromptu dinners, summers spent across the equator — in order to write about them. I went from city to city with few confidants other than the waiters who took my order.

I assure myself that as long as I’m writing, the story itself — this vague, amorphous thing that I project my life unto — will remain my object of obsession. This fate is better than the alternative, which renders the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on flights useless.

That summer — the one that marked my twenty-first birthday — I began to notice my Texan accent. It stuck to the roof of my mouth, thick like peanut butter between slices of Wonder Bread. With the false-prophet confidence its languid pace and wide vowels afforded me, I wandered around Panama City streets into coffee shops and crowded hotel bars, observing strangers kissing and crying. I searched for some universality in their experience; hoped that my journal might render me partially invisible to them; hoped they would remain oblivious to their role in my quest for meaning. 

In doing so, I found myself transformed into someone I never thought I would become: a writer, one who works herself to the bone turning my real life into something that looks like beauty on paper. I work furiously, driving myself mad by knowing that once I am done, there is no finale waiting for me. Still, I find this pursuit maddening, more addicting than anything I’ve known.

A Southwest Airlines flight — a Boeing 737 — brings me back to my roots. As I depart the plane, I feel heavy — weighed down by collections of words joined together with no real throughline of beauty to make them make sense.

As I unstuff my life from its previous home — two suitcases and a backpack — I begin finding discarded pieces of paper lodged in the pockets of my leather jackets, tucked in between the pages of hardcover books, nestled in between glass perfume bottles.

I attempt to reconcile my real life with the beautiful version that I’ve constructed. With each real memory I find tangled into half-truths written on the paper scraps, I see myself shifting, leaning into the role of my story’s own unreliable narrator. I know that I’m cleaving my life into two by doing so, but it’s addicting — the feeling of believing you have a winning hand.

The truth appears far less romantic: I’m running from the pain of mundanity as it chases me down, sticking itself to me with barbie-pink chewing gum and withered washi tape. I can only hope that my heart does not give out on me before it is too late.

I search relentlessly for a winning hand, a conclusion — anything. I rifle through my purse, where a litany of greasy fortune cookie papers swim around. In the small space left below my fortune from one cookie, I’d squeezed in some thoughts in black ink. All together, it nonsensically reads:

‘Trust your intuition and your sweet tooth. Both are right!’

The world didn’t stop spinning.

Reading the two together post-mortem, I can interpret nothing — neither meaning nor beauty.

This is how you know you have a losing hand. This is how you know when to fold. The thing is: I won’t.

There’s no other option. When — if — I finally get it right, I must let it go, and my life will exist in two halves — the real experience, and the one I have constructed, ripe with carefully-curated charm.

The pride I have for this is rivaled only by my disappointment in knowing that no record will exist of my own agency — the work that I afforded in the careful lies, the meanders around the truth — in the final, written version.

I become a little more than a name below a story, a nod to the person who paid enough attention to remember to write things down. In the aftermath, I am no longer the writer — I’m simply someone who wishes to be one. This is not who I want to be — I want to be beautiful enough to have beauty pass through me.

The story that I’m telling — the one that I am living — becomes one of yearning in perpetuity, of constantly decanting myself onto a sheet of paper. This is what drives the story — the one that has yet to exist — forward.

This is my inherent error, the inescapable quality that pushes my story towards its inevitable, tragic end, but —

Maybe, like that itsy-bitsy hole in my heart, I’ll grow out of this.

Maybe things have gotten better, but analyzing such progress when you’re so busy living and saying yes and kissing and feeling so much gets boring.

So I leave the question for another day, and keep on writing. ■