It's not my fault the casualty count was so high. No, it's not entirely my fault at all, nor is it yours. It's just one of those things that happens and doesn't fit under the definition of "accident" or "mistake". It happened and that's that. It's not my fault your body gives off some magnetic wave or pheromones or some other sort of poison, and I suppose I could have sheltered myself from you, but I couldn't, not at all. And I felt it coming, I felt you coming from a mile away, and there it went. You may not believe me, but it's the truth. It happened. It started with an ache, the disrupted rhythmic beating of my heart, expanding. The swelling of my pericardium and the intumescence of my chambers and I thought it might have been my imagination. Wrong. We stood there, silent, and you looked at me and then I couldn't stop it. I felt it, growing, growing and it was then far beyond my control. My heart, with you as a catalyst, multiplied in size. The tissue and veins, I could feel them, twisted in an orgy of unnatural reproduction. More, more, more.. My arteries became entangled and tore as the organ grew to gargantuan size. I saw your eyes grow vast with shock and I opened my mouth to apologize for the awkward circumstances, or was it to scream in intolerable pain, but this parasite of a heart had plastered my paper-thin lungs to the walls of my cavity and I couldn't breathe.. Suffocating, suffocating.. And then, in the goal of survival, I sprouted gills. It happened, and I stood in front of you, and you looked at me, and I was no longer human. I felt the organ surge against my ribcage, pounding harder with every ill-fated beat. I heard my ribs creak, the unnatural sound of unoiled machinery, and then they shattered. I was being torn appart from the inside, you-the cause. I would have told you to leave me had my massive heart not crushed my vocal cords. Helpless. I cringed and suffered as I watched my skin stretch to accomodate the messy bundle of aorta and ventricles, and in a second, I was ripped at the seams. Seamless, but disconnected. I watched my skin, my safety coverage rupture to expose all that I kept inside. I gushed, the flow would not cease and I had forgotten how much I had kept inside. The tide escaped me, shredding me into pieces, still coming in waves that matched the pounding of my inflammed heart and my insides were over our heads. You were drowning, choking on my secrets and desires; I was drowning you. And I was sure my current had reached far and wide and I was a murderer. The whole country was gagging on my emotions marinaded in my warm blood, and I was breathing through my gills, and you were dying. I had to save you. I pushed myself to hold you above the mass, but I was coming apart. Piece by piece. The ligaments and muscle that had previously been my adhesive were tattered and frayed, and I could barely keep myself together, and my insides had enveloped the earth and were extending to swallow the universe and you were submerging farther into the ocean I created.. I can save you. I can save you. I can save you, but you have to save me first. You read it in my eyes and you knew that you had to put me back together. The world depended on it; you depended on it. I depended on it, but that was not my primary concern as you held your breath and reassembled me, piece by piece. You sewed me shut with careful stiches that left no mark, you always were an artist I suppose, and the touch of your hand tracing the malevolent dictator that started the flood was medicinal enough to make it cower to it's normal state. Your fingers joined my skin where the stiches had been, and sometimes my veins would encompass them, leaving a part of us inside each other and all the while I was terrified that you'd run out of breath and all at once, it became serene. I swallowed everything back and the earth could breath again. The heart returned to it's quiet metronomial beating. The news ran reports of the casualties and interviewed you as a hero for saving the world. Thousands of people died that day and you were a hero. And I know that what you did was heroic and brave because you didn't have to do it, and that keeps drilling a question into my head, if the world had not depended on it, would you still be my savior? And we'll remain, the hero and the tragic cause and I won't reduce your glory by proclaiming the truth. Let them believe it was a "mistake", an "accident". Let them blame me, although it's not entirely my fault at all, nor is it yours. It's not my fault that you give off some special poison that taints me from exposure..And you may think that it was my imagination. Wrong. It happened, and that's that.

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