My name's Brandon, and I would like to share.

An old Art Director from my previous life as an Ad Exec. stole my heart. That’s how the dream went anyway. I lay on my back atop a conference room table, my chest opened and the skin pulled back like a dissected frog’s, while he stood over me explaining that a person’s heart can be removed from the body for a brief period of time with no harm done. “You can actually hold your own heart in your hands and watch it beat,” he said. “The heart’s pretty neat like that.” He reached into my chest cavity and rummaged around, disconnecting my heart from it’s many important wires, and pulled it out and showed it to me as if I had just given birth to the thing. “See?” Sure enough, it was still beating, and I was still very much alive. “Bad ass,” I must’ve said or something to that effect as I watched my glistening heart contract in the palm of his hand, like a dry-heaving newborn pig. He began playing with my heart – pulling and pushing, stretching and twisting – to test the durability of my heart tissue. At one point he clamped his thumb and forefinger around it and squeezed the way you might squeeze a deflated balloon, making one end translucent and bulbous with excess air. He grinned and nodded maniacally at me. “Ain’t this just the coolest?” “Ok, Kyle,” I said. “Let’s go ahead and put my heart back.” He never did specify how long one could function without one’s heart, and I was beginning to feel lightheaded. “Right, right,” he said and focused his mania on my empty chest cavity. He placed my heart in, took a step back and eyed it perplexedly, then rotated it 90 degrees clockwise before nodding, pleased. I felt a strange tingling sensation in my lips. He fumbled with my inner circuitry, reattaching my heart to its various input and output connections as if connecting his DSL modem for the first time. “Please hurry, Kyle,” I said calmly, euphoria setting in. He mumbled to himself and traced the path of each important artery. “This one goes here, that one there, this one…” he trails off and does some counting on his fingers. “Hurry up, Kyle.” I can’t remember if he connected me in time.