“Every heart sings a song,
incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always
find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” - Plato
Such an unlikely force, all ventricles and atriums and vena
cava and aorta in its bloody, thumping glory.
For centuries we’ve romanticized it, this mass of muscle that
stands between life and death, the here and the hereafter. We’re obsessed with
the power it holds over us, physical and emotional. We embrace the rapture and
the intimacy – we fear the crippling pain.
But for all the pain it can bring, at the very heart of the
matter is this: our desire to love and be loved.
To see someone’s eyes warm with you in them. To feel a
heartbeat quicken. To cause and be the cause of gentle laughter. To know that
when the tears come someone will catch them before they fall. To fall asleep holding
hands.
It is a human truth that we hurt the ones we love the most
and I have hovered on the brink for weeks, struggling to remind myself that the
fault is not theirs. Too many worries weigh on me and I count the resolution of
each as one step nearer to closing the doors that stand open, cutting the cords
that tie me down and lifting the anchors that pull me beneath the surface.
I can hear my own heartbeat rising.
The weeks ahead are causing me heartburn, a reliving of the pain that
crippled me for so long and that I have fought so hard to come back from. I
have endured it, embraced it and drawn strength from it. But before I relive
the past, my heart will be tested and I am as afraid of what they might find as
what they won’t.
They’ll see the ventricles and atriums and vena cava and aorta and the
valves flapping open and closed in their fluttery dance. They’ll trace the flow
of my life’s blood in vivid blues and reds. They’ll measure the muscle and they’ll
count the beats. They’ll look at all of the numbers and the scans and tell me
if I am strong of heart.
They won't see the heartbeat within.