Some Things You Know About Your Heart, Some Others You Don't

—Abel Pann

You know how your heart moves, how it lurches and staggers and sways like a beaten bell in your chest.

You know how it sounds: That sound. 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 reaching for something outside its grasp, when it is straining to become a heart more human than any heart can ever be.

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 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 its slow, liquid orbit of the soul.

You know what it looks like in a masked man’s hands; how it looks when it’s laid out and 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 bleeding.

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 dreams, and need.