Heartbeat
Heartbeat I’ve always been scared by the beating of the heart. Never in my childhood was I tempted to pick up a stethoscope, toy or real, to eavesdrop on that thumping that is the indisputable proof of human life. I resisted taking my own pulse, even when instructed to do so in middle school health class, hated the throbbing of my arm compressed by a blood-pressure cuff. It is folk knowledge that children are soothed by the beating heart of their parents, the soundtrack to which the infant develops in the safety of the womb. But the heartbeat of my parents, and later my boyfriends or partners, failed to bring me comfort but instead repulsed me and caused me to shift myself away from that drumming, disconcertingly both regular and irregular. I trained my mind to focus on the person - their warmth of their embrace, the familiarity of their features - rather than this foreign, fleshy organ pulsating inside of them. Only now have I stopped to delve more deeply into this discomfort, my aversion to this most sensual and physical proof of life. Now I think that perhaps all my life my heart was communicating to me through its beating, repeating a message I chose to ignore. It was telling me ‘you are alive but just as fragile as the parts that compose you’. I didn’t listen to this voice not because I didn’t want to listen to it, but because I was terrified to hear it jump or skip or stop altogether. I was afraid to admit the power of matter over mind, the contingency of me. As I pursued proof of life outside myself, the feeling of being alive became the rush of achievement, the burning lungs and aching limbs of a body in motion, always pushing harder and further and faster – onwards and upwards. And because I ignored the voice of my heart and its message, I didn’t notice when it grew weaker and weaker, reduced to a whisper. I ignored my heartbeat until I couldn’t anymore. That moment came in a doctor’s office in April, a setting non-descript in its sterility and florescence. The doctor’s words percolated slowly through the filters of my consciousness; my heartrate was dangerously low, and I was suffering from ‘malnutrition.’ I was alone, sitting on the crinkly paper of the patient’s chair. In the half-hour before seeing the doctor, I had been asked by the nurses to undress and lie still as wires were attached to my chest and upper body in a pattern that seemed to me to be random, to stand on a scale which was read from a handheld device that I couldn’t see. A little machine was clipped onto my finger that showed numbers I didn’t know the meaning of, and a bloodpressure cuff was wrapped around my arm, pumped to squeeze like a boa constrictor strangling its prey. I felt the throbbing of my arm as the sleeve released, and it reminded me of my heartbeat. I wished the pulsing to stop, and it did. A nurse dressed in dark blue entered all this collected data – all these facts from which I felt so disconnected – into a chunky IBM laptop on the desk next to the patient’s chair, angled away from me, of course.
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