I imagine it as a balloon, loosely tethered by arteries and veins to the hollow

cavity the doctors discovered in my chest. It's invisible and intangible, but I can feel it beating, keeping me alive.

When I was small, they did many tests on me, but the state and location of my heart alluded all medical scrutiny.

The doctors couldn't see anything in an X-ray or MRI scan,

much less explain to my horrified parents

how their little boy was still alive and how they could feel a pulse in his wrist.

They kept theorizing that I didn't have a heart, to which I told them I did.

Right here, I said, pointing to the empty air to the right of where I felt my ghostly heart

floating swaying in the draft coming from the air vents and beating his steady

rhythm. When I passed my hand through it, I felt a small warmth echo in my chest.

It's floating right here, like a balloon.

X-ray scans of the empty air predictably revealed nothing.

I grew up a sickly boy, pale and fragile, and never allowed to move the way I wanted to. The further my heart strayed from my body,

the colder and weaker I felt. If I ran too fast, I could feel my heart lag behind me until

its strings pulled taut, making me dizzy and short of a breath.

If the car I was in lurched too far, I choked and felt my consciousness flicker.

On my first day of kindergarten, the teacher tried to pull me away from my

parents as they waved goodbye, and my heart clung to my mother so tightly that I only made

it a few painful steps before keeling over to the ground, lost to the world in a death-like sleep.

I remember vaguely hearing the sound of screaming and the whale of an ambulance.

Despite the ever-present concern from my screaming and the wail of an ambulance.

Despite the ever-present concern from my parents and my doctors, I learned to live with my strange

...