The wHole Thing

“Do you love me with your whole heart?”
“Yeah. The whole thing.”
~From Pirates XXX (2005)

The hole in my heart is punch shaped, and Yes, that one’s from you.
The one in my head feels like a hangover, but can be traced to the stifling fluorescent lights of a discount shopping center in Hanover, New Hampshire. The one in my stomach has been there since birth, or sometime shortly thereafter when I learned to eat solid food. I think it was created by a stale chocolate graham cracker – though no, I can’t be sure. The one on my right foot is tiny, and was made by the puncturing blade of a custom Ridel figure skate. The one on my left shoulder is filled with white sand. The one on my ankle came from a unicorn.

I remember making the one in my nose with a toothpick at a play date when I was five, but only because that one bled a lot, and my mother insisted she know why exactly I’d done it.

The four in my earlobes were the product of much wheedling, and were ostensibly birthday gifts, although the three in my cartilage were beyond contestation, since I’d gained my majority.
The one on my chin is a scar from a zit I popped because it was giving me a migraine. The one in my eyeball is from a pin that broke when I forgot to take it out before sewing through it, so I stuffed that one with cotton and loose pieces of thread. The thread looks like veins. The cotton does not really look like eyeball jelly. But no one gets close enough to tell.
In fact, no one gets close enough to notice any of my holes any more. Sometimes I cover them with make-up, and pretend that people can’t see them, but I know it’s only pretend. Everyone in the world can see them, plain as day. But they don’t.
To be perfectly honest, no one is looking.

There’s a hole in my watch that I use to hold all of my spare time, and one in my memory that used to hold things like the ways you annoy me – but then it got full, and now I have a huge problem with loitering in the area it used to occupy. In fact, I sent someone in to round everything up and redistribute it, but they just sent things down to the hole in my heart, which was clearly not the right shape. Things kept pushing through anyway, smashing fragile walls, gouging long white scratches and bedraggled corners, and now the hole is jagged and torn around the edges where the Ways I Love You were too big to fit and just burst through, dragged mercilessly behind the Ways I Hate You. Someone tried to fix this by directing them towards the hole in my stomach, but they kept ordering food and then running out on the check. I had to start sending things back, and you know how I hate to do that.
The one in my liver was like a freaking worm hole, that just spontaneously occurred and started gobbling things up, until one day it closed back in on itself and was lost. Too bad the one in my ego won’t do the same.

There is a hole in my heart. And it came from the bite of a batmonkey-boy. This origin complicated everything because it also gave me rabbies, and I had to get shots in my stomach to cure me. So now there’s a hole in my stomach, which looks like a belly button and is right on top of the one I already have, and I have been excessively clear that that can only be filled by a furry pink pony, which tastes like strawberries, and smells like grapefruit juice.

Together, the pony and I will cross the dunes of Mesopotamia, subsisting on wild jelly beans, of which I will eat more than my share, causing the pony to complain that I’m eating them like a chain-smoker eats crack cocaine while he’s waiting for the subway. I will ask what kind of sense that makes.
It makes punch sense.
That’s what kind of sense.
Don’t listen to me, I’m punch drunk.