The True Place For The Heart
By robink
- 508 reads
Lover buys me chocolate hearts, in a box surrounded by golden
wrapping and tangled in a red bow. The card reads, "Love always." He
prints his initials on the ticket circled by an imperfect heart.
Why do we place our hearts as the centre of our desire? They can be
big, or open, or warmed, but they bleed and ache and break. We feel
from the bottom of them while they beat us half to death. I've chosen
instead to feel from different place. My stomach.
This strategy has several advantages. My stomach is large enough to
love the whole world, many times over. If tensed, it can take punches
with hardly any pain. If it aches, I can swallow chalky tablets. If it
bursts, surgeons could staple the flaps back together. Not that I feel
in any danger of it bursting. It seems to grow with every diner Lover
takes me to.
Lover and I on the shore. We have moved on from sharing hands. Now we
wrap our arms around each other's abdomens. Secret hands squeezed into
jeans, under shirts, onto sticky skin. Lover pinches an inch of my love
between his thumb and finger.
We laugh at the children of other lovers flopping into the sea. A
blubbery boy waddles by, button projecting from balloon tummy.
"Are you an inny or an outy?" Lover asks of me. The bellybutton is the
human hallmark, a reminder that once we were all in the placental
embrace of our mothers. She loved you first through your belly, so why
should we move love to our hearts?
I'm not suggesting that we don't love our stomachs. We keep them
constantly fed and watered. They are toned, tanned, and pulled in to be
paraded. But loving something does not make that thing desire. I tell
Lover this. Like seedlings, it will choose its own time to
flourish.
I can feel the irregular shapes of the shingle through the thin canvas
of my beach shoes. I can feel fine salt in the wind on my face, the
warmth of the sun on my neck. The heart is just a pump, a device,
circulating our blood. Vital to our existence, that's true, but that's
all. We can live with out an appendix and we can't live without the
heart, or a substitute. But is it more important than our lungs or
kidneys? Or stomach? No nerves end in the heart, so how could it feel?
Like that old joke, it feels awful. I think of mine pickled in a
laboratory, pale and shrivelled behind glass or pinned out on a
board.
When the light falls from the sky, and orange clouds fluff the horizon,
Lover asks me for my heart. I tell Lover, I will be glad to loose my
heart. I am misunderstood, kissed. One day my stomach might flutter
when Lover looks at me, or turn, if Lover is late, but tonight my heart
is the only booty. I'm aware of my hunger on the way back to the car
park.
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