You know how your heart moves, how it lurches and staggers and sways like a hobbled bell in your chest.
You know how it sounds: Those noises. That familiar music. The rattle of a cold slate shingle banging up against your ribs. The squeak of its eraser at work somewhere just behind your sternum. Its fractured song.
You know its strange language, all its clipped dialects and speech defects, the things it can and cannot say. The things it will not say.
You know when it’s grasping for something no human heart can ever have.
You know the relentless rhythm of its shovel at work in the orchard at night. In the morning you can see where it has been foraging in the garden, the glistening scarlet trail in the dew where it has dragged itself to the river’s edge.
You’re familiar with its murmurs and lullabies, its myriad prayers and laments, its low, protracted moans.
You know when it has been looking at this world through the wrong end of a telescope and when it has bundled itself in burlap or nestled deep in shavings to protect itself from the cold.
You know when it’s burning.
You know when it’s gone feral on you, when it is limping down off the mountain under a January moon, in search of companionship and sustenance from needy things and dead things preserved by the snow. You love and fear its animal moments, its wild spasms of longing and lust and unspeakable loneliness.
You know that it does not live by breaking, that nothing truly broken can ever again be made fully whole.
You see it in the space behind your closed eyes, a dark crimson planet wobbling through the slow, liquid orbit of its soul.
You know what it looks like in a masked man’s hands; how it looks when it’s laid out all alone on a stainless steel table, and when it’s simmering in a soup pot, and turning black at the bottom of a bucket on a hot dock. You know what it looks like projected on a giant screen and impaled at the end of a sharp stick.
You know its heaves and hesitations, and how it learns, longs, wishes, and crawls for miles along dark roads following one dim, diminishing star on the distant horizon. You know how it holds on, gives out, gives in, and gives itself up, and over. How it gives up.
How it goes on, and lives by beating, lives by dreaming.
You still don’t know, though, still don’t understand, what your heart is. You still don’t know what it wants. This is one of those things it will not say. You only know that it belongs to you and you’ll never let it go.
And when it grows weary you cradle it in your arms and talk to it through the long, dark hours. Together you keep your vigil, waiting for a sign. You plead and sing and whisper old, familiar stories and lies to it, until the beating stops, until at last you are carried off together into deep sleep, merciful sleep, into silence, into a safe place far beyond the terrifying world of need and dreams.
If you spend too much time obsessing about your heart pumping away behind your ribcage it can make you crazy. Still, it’s hard not to think about the sheer, terrifying marvel of the thing, the job it does, laboring around the clock, year in and year out, to keep your strange machine rolling.
You can, though, live a long time and still have no real idea how your heart works, all the mysterious ways in which it is integrated with so many other mysterious miracles of the human body and mind.
You often find yourself wondering at what point humans started taking each other apart to try to determine what sort of stuff they were made of and how they worked. You imagine the first man who removed a heart from a body and held it in his hands; what in God’s name must he have been thinking? Do you suppose he had any idea what he was looking at, or grasped the fact that this oddly configured and plumbed thing in his hands was the source of the mysterious rhythm that drove his body through time?
How did anyone ever figure anything like that out, unless something outside the world was there to steer them?
And at what point did humans begin to assign to the heart the status or function of metaphor, the most versatile metaphor in the metaphorical playbook?
You drive off to work in the gray murk of a February morning and return home in darkness each evening, your heart a distant and dull murmur in your chest. You feel it, though. You know it’s there, all tangled up in old fishing line and netting. You remember all those times you wrenched it onto a hook and cast it out into the world, hoping some big dream would swallow it whole and drag you after it into some deep and satisfying place.
It got snagged and chewed up pretty good over the years, but that just meant you’d had some bites, even if every one of them had gotten away. And on each occasion, usually in the middle of the night, you reeled your heart back in and were confronted by the damage.
How many nights do you suppose you sailed alone in the darkness with your heart bobbing in a bucket next to you?
You were always looking for something. There were ideas you couldn’t get out of your head, big ideas, stupid ideas. Jesus Christ, son, you made some mistakes. You did some damned foolish things, didn’t you? Yes, sir, you sure enough did. It’s a miracle that heart of yours is still beating.
Did you think there would be no consequences? That you could walk away scot-free?
You did, you rascal. Didn’t you?
I did.
Love you and your beautiful heart Brad. Thank you ♥️