The human heart is an amazing thing. It can withstand G-forces, disease, and neglect. It can beat around 100,000 times a day without you having to remember to tell it to. It can change its rhythm almost instantly. Fear, excitement, exercise, attraction, pain, surprise—all can alter the heart rate within seconds. It is constantly responding to what is happening around you. In you. Part of the human heart can actually die, and the muscle tissue can go from a very healthy color to gray, and it’ll keep beating. It really wants you to be alive. Or maybe it just likes to thrump, thrump. Everybody needs one to be alive- modern technology and all the artificial models aside, you need at least a stand-in to exist on the earth or around it.
So we’re all out here with our human hearts. And they’re so astounding. And they’re so central that we’ve made the human heart the core of just about everything- central to the metaphorical high command human experience. We’ve attached emotional equilibrium to the state of the human heart. We’ve attached our ability to love, our experiences with love, our inabilities to care and have affection for other people, and even perhaps the rejection of our affection to the human heart.
And we’re not going to get to the liver of the matter, or the spleen of the matter, but we are going to get to the heart of the matter.
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If someone has a certain set of reactionary responses, they can be heartless. If someone has a deep streak of personality that exudes worth, warmth, and inclusion, and an outward fascination with everything, according to Mr. Lewis they’ve got heart and soul, And the heart headlines when you’re the most kick-ass female rock singer of all time (IMHO, Ms. Wilson!)
Our heart. It can be fractured or shattered or broken or destroyed, but it still beats. And sometimes when our core is shaken, or somebody comes at it with a machete, or an atom blaster, the heart will go on.
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As far as my heart goes, it has its quirks. I have extremely low blood pressure physically, and an extreme low tolerance for bullshit temperamentally. I have genetically inclined high cholesterol. When I lay on my left side, my EKG reading is completely different than when I lay on my right side. If interaction with another person boosts and uplifts my heart, my heartbeat slows down and becomes extremely peaceful. If somebody is out there, all sus, my heartbeat speeds up. Physically, my heart has sustained me and kept me breathing and alive through childbirth, twice. My heart keeps its shit together when attached to the plumbing. I can utilize countermeasures. I was taught to bring up quadratic equations in my mind and to solve them in order to distract my heart, in such a scenario, if necessary. We all teach ourselves to protect our well-being from the intrusion of the mess that comes with a broken heart. A broken heart is the truth of an individual in a way that no other truth can reveal things that are private. You can be in love and no person in your life might know it, but hiding or downplaying the end of a heart connection is near impossible. Too many things end along with it.
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Every now and then, when I’m still, when I’m reading or writing, or perhaps laying in bed, my heart will unexpectedly do two seriously hard thrumps against the inside of my chest that I can’t ignore. As if it is saying: remember me! I’m still here! Get ready!
My heart has been emotionally dislodged from my chest twice. Twice, but it was death by a thousand cuts, not a brutal, mashing event. It happened once when I was still in my teens, and once in my late thirties. A friend. A half-sister. Literal death in the first case, alcoholism and the choice to attach to unavailable men in the second.
In that sense, I’ve been fortunate.
Because I haven’t had to deal with a broken heart, although it has been broken.
The curious thing is no romantic partner has broken my heart. But I have had romantic heartache. In one case, a situation surrounding romance ended the relationship, and in another case, the removal of proximity ended the connection. There was a guy decades ago who was my first young adult romance, but life put too many miles in between. And then there were the two who as they became familiar, were much too different in thought and mindset and so emotion and feeling waned. The guys didn’t rate, but my heart couldn’t ignore the disappointment. It was tough enough to walk away, but it needed some cradling nonetheless. So I cuddled. I’m solid like that.
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And lately, quite like the sharp, definite little tap of a stinkbug landing on a window, I belong to myself again. Vanishing credit did that. It gave me back to me.
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The indirect way the heart can be affected by circumstance, such as major life changes, physical challenges, a poor diet, a poisoned environment, literally, become apparent over time or in a flash. I’ve never worn my heart on my sleeve, and I keep my heart deep inside my chest. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a protective thing, but you’d have to know me and read me, literally, to even begin to understand the way that my insides work.
Because everything and all of me is run through my Virgo core, I really have to think about individual emotions before I feel anything about them. I laugh, I cry, I raise my voice, I smile, give side-eye, and at times simply breathe through a nice breeze or an interesting moment. Yet those physical responses are only that- a response. They do not define the internal, heart-based inside of me. Once I decide how I will ultimately permit anything heartfelt to dig in, the pause in unpaused. Then I know how I feel. But that is later.
Later, after whatever comes of any certain thing settles in.
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So, as my marriage comes to an end, I’m wondering…
Where is my heart in it all?
I can’t find it, riffling through piles of life stacked there or small boxes of memories there. I don’t hear it in the music I listen to or feel it while walking. I think it was lost. In the deep cracks I was pressed into. In the potholes I was forced to hit at high speed. Down, over the edge of the cliffs I was led to, and with the slightest bump found myself, arms flailing, waiting to splatter on the rocks below. Thank you heart, for bracing. Thank you for your strength and ability to adapt. Thank you for absorbing the major part of impact that may have stopped you, had you gone limp and let the freight train run right over you.
My heart, in the wake of the ultimate rejection, is like Schwarzenegger T-1000, end of Genisys. It is hit with a bomb, but doesn’t shatter. It turns to liquid and reconstitutes. My heart is bulletproof.
The future and the new beginnings? There she is! She’s moving the blood through my body. She’s saving up smiles and a kiss and approachability and mysteries and fun. All the wonder and surprise? She’s there for it.
My heart isn’t meant for a senseless ending. It is meant for my daydreams and some new him. The romance, when it arrives, will welcomed by my damn-near indestructible heart.
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photos + a haven + a place that gave answers + 2023-2026