I remember when I was small enough to use my mother like a mattress, to curl up on top of her, my head to her chest. I’d hear her heart, its rhythmic beating, and I’d get anxious, tense. I don’t know what I thought then, if thoughts even accompanied feelings, or if only later, as I’ve grown, I’ve found the reason, or invented it.
The heart beats, beats, beats, until it stops. I’m exhausted just thinking of it—this prisoner inside my rib cage, pumping relentlessly for all of its existence—as much a part of me as my face, but I’ll never even get to see it.
And now there is my husband’s heart, the tick-tock of which I avoid by resting my head on his shoulder instead of his chest. For weeks he suffered palpitations and the mystery of them, trying to find the why, the how. Sometimes he’s up all night because it’s racing. “It’s stress,” I tell him, and he adjusts his diet, takes walks, works on his exercise routine. “I just need to get better at controlling it,” he says. “There are some things that are out of our control,” I tell him, “even things that are happening inside of us.”
During my pregnancies I would imagine, not just the babies I was incubating, but all their little parts. How strange, I still think, that two hearts grew inside me, beat from within me, just a few inches below mine—my extra hearts that now beat on their own, out in the world.
“I can feel my heart beating, that means I’m excited,” my son observed at age six.
Before that, when he was five and preoccupied with his awareness that “everything alive will die,” he learned that firefighters have paddles to restart people’s hearts—making mortality not, in fact, inevitable, he concluded.
One night, with him curled up to the left of me and my daughter to my right—wedged there in my nightly ritual of waiting for them to fall asleep, I heard him sobbing and he said to me, “I need to tell you something that you have to remember,” his breath growing more erratic, his voice breaking, “please write this down so you remember,” he said, as tears rushed down his red cheeks. “Call a fireman with the machines to start my heart. Do all firemen have them? Please tell me,” gasping as each urgent word struggled towards release, “Please call someone with the machines to start my heart, please write this down so you remember.”
Under glow-in-the-dark planets and stars, with his blonde head upon my chest and my arms wrapped tight around him, I promised, “I will write it down, I will remember,” as I rocked us back and forth.
And before that—when my daughter was cut from me ten weeks too soon because my placenta, the organ that connected us, that allowed my oxygen and nutrients to flow into her, tore from the lining of my womb—for six weeks I’d sit in the NICU and hold her 3lb, then 2lb, then 4lb body on my chest, as often as the nurses would allow. I’d watch the green lines on her monitor, keep them moving with my mind, as the doctors kept them moving with an IV line of caffeine, as she kept them moving with her strength of will, her power of persistence.
She draws them now—little hearts—all over everything. Sometimes beside her name—IRIS. Sometimes atop a wiggly line—a string—in the hand of a stick figure her, holding hands with a stick figure me. My son has developed a way to make them perfect. You start with a V, inside which you draw a T to connect its points so as to find the center from which you draw two curved lines at the top and ta-da! Symmetry!
I keep a box by my desk for their daily deliveries, a box full of love notes from my children, a box full of hearts. I like to imagine that someday I’ll keep a top desk drawer, or perhaps a chest, devoted to these artifacts from their young lives. Because nothing is ever still, because everything is trapped in a constant state of change, once in a while, I will open it. I will trace these hearts with my finger. I will feel as if I have cheated time. The older we get, the more it will hurt to look.
Ashlee Laielli is an MFA student in nonfiction at the University of San Francisco. She currently lives in the East Bay with her partner and two young children.
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Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash