Big-Hearted Boy.

i was watching "once in a blue moon" and the boy reminded me of myself, and i was struck with this idea. this is supposed to be read as if someone were reading it to you. if that makes sense.

when i was little there was a boy in my class who always sat alone on the bus. he never spoke up in class and always stayed sitting after the bell rang until everyone had left the coat hangers. no one would talk to him, at least not very often. the teachers would give him his homework and he'd give it back with most of the questions done and half of the answers wrong. his parents would get phone calls and they would tell him he needs to study and to try harder and most of all to take pride in his work while he would sit there and pretend he was listening by trying to look sorry and not saying a word.

each day he would doodle in his books when he should have been writing, and draw on his desk when he ran out of pages. he'd stare out the window watch the rain fall, then the leaves, and as the winter came so did the snowflakes. for Valentine's day the teacher always made each student write another student a valentine's day card. he had never had one given to him, but one year he decided he was going to. 

i remember he grabbed the biggest piece of red construction paper he could find, and some pink, a little bit of white, and he attacked all of them with a pair of scissors. he grabbed some glue and stuck pieces together until everyone could see he had the biggest heart of anyone. the teacher asked him why he made it so big, and told him he should know hearts are much much smaller, not the size he had made. i remember him saying back "well... mine is." and he went right back to work, grabbing felt pens and pencil crayons, scribbling and scribbling until the felts ran dry. everyone left him alone, he didn't talk to anyone, but no one talked to him anyways.

when Valentine's day came everyone's cards were all on the desks they were meant to be on. everyone came that day, except for the boy with the big heart, i remember the teacher saying he was really sick, something to do with his heart, and that he wouldn't be there. his card was still on his desk, scraps of paper around it and on the floor from when he was making it. after attendance we were all allowed to open up and read our cards and hearts, blush, and shyly say thank you to who they came from. 

i remember seeing the teacher walk over to his desk and pick up his card while everyone else was running around and flirting without knowing it. it was small and shapeless, he must have folded it before he left. i watched her unfold it from across the room, and as she did it kept getting bigger and bigger, eventually looking bigger than i remember it being before. she looked at it, then looked closer, and then started to cry. i went up to her and asked her what was wrong but she told me it was nothing and then started to settle the class down while collecting herself. the rest of the day went by pretty normally, and we all went home at the end of it. 

the next day when we showed up his heart was up on the chalkboard and we could all see it. i went up to look at it and read what it said, and after i sat back down one by one all the other kids did too. it was big, really big, and had lots of smaller hearts decorating it. i counted them, there was one for each person in our class. there was a big "Happy Valentine's day." in cut out letters across the top of it, no exclamation mark, i remember that was strange. at the center of it was a little piece of lined paper that looked like it had been torn out of a small notebook. on the lines was something written in pencil, it went like this:

 

"To: Me.

I don't have much to give you 

that you don't already have

since we have all the same things anyways.

i can't write any of that gushy icky stuff,

since i'm pretty sure we both don't know what love is.

but i know you pretty well, 

and i know you're pretty nice.

and i like that you like the rain,

because i like it too. 

i know kids don't talk to you

and i know that makes you feel sad,

but don't worry,

i like your words.

I don't think there's much i can really do

but i hope this lets them all see, finally,

that you have a really big heart."

 

he had made sure he finally got a valentine's card that year...

when the teacher came in she had us all sit down and told us that we wouldn't be seeing the big-hearted boy for a little while, and that he was very sick and in the hospital. she said we should do something to help him feel better, so we all got out our scissors and glue and started cutting and gluing. we sent him two huge boxes of our hearts, all different shapes and sizes and colours, and we all wrote little messages on them. some people said things like "you're cool", "i feel the same way", "i think you're cute", "i hope you get well" and others just signed their names. we all waited to hear how he liked them but his mom told us he wasn't awake. we waited two weeks until we heard anything, asking the teacher every day, some of us even had our parents call his just to ask. the teacher sat us all down and said she had some bad news, that we wouldn't be seeing the boy again, that he had gone away. i remember she said something about all of our great great grandparents but none of us understood. when i got home i found out that all of our parents had been called and told that we wouldn't be seeing him again too, because when i told them they didn't seem surprised. they sat me down after dinner one night and tried to explain to me what Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was.     

i remember getting lost after the first few sounds and then not knowing when they were saying real words again. it took them a little while for me to understand, but eventually i did. it turned out that he had problems with his blood flow, or circulation, and it was hurting his heart. sometimes a heart will try too hard and build up extra muscle, too much muscle, and hurt itself. when a heart does that it's said to be enlarged, and he had a very large heart. they say there's lots of reasons why it can happen, and that no one can know why it sometimes chooses little children. or maybe they do, i wasn't really listening for that part.

Author's Note

i'm not doing very well emotionally right now, and so at times this was hard to write, as some of it's pretty personal. it might be more or less personal than you think, and if you asked i don't think i could tell you.