Imagine a Heart

High school week con­tin­ues with a longer prose piece, circa 1996. I was such an earnest kid, but already much too old to be writ­ing sen­ti­men­tal stuff like this.

Imag­ine a heart. It has stopped beat­ing and lays dor­mant in the chest of a dead man who lays on a table. Men and women sur­round the man and try to make his heart beat again. They want it to beat and they know it wants to beat again. The man is young and obvi­ously has a full life ahead of him. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the doc­tors all say. But the man isn’t lis­ten­ing. He doesn’t know if his heart should beat again.

Imag­ine two hearts, a tiny one beat­ing along with a big­ger, much stronger one. Imag­ine the secu­rity that baby heart feels, with Mother nearby. Fol­low the tiny heart as it grows up through the years. Soot it is strong, like the one who pro­tects it. It no longer wants pro­tec­tion. When it wants to leave the sanc­tu­ary of home, the strong one doesn’t want to let it go. She doesn’t know how to let her child grow.

Imag­ine two hearts with the same wants and needs, the same hopes and dreams. They are drawn to each other in a way they can’t under­stand. What if they stay together? They could both recap­ture the old feel­ing of secu­rity. They could add to that feel­ing a new sen­sa­tion, com­bin­ing the past with the won­der and excite­ment they have dis­cov­ered. These two have sought each other out, felt the thrill of dis­cov­ery. What would that feel like? So easy to under­stand and vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to explain. Nobody knows how to express it.

Imag­ine a bro­ken heart, aban­doned by its mate and left to con­tinue the jour­ney of life alone. With noth­ing to keep it going. Liv­ing just to keep from dying. How could this heart go on, with­out a rea­son to feel, with­out a focus? Its wants and needs build up with no chance of release. Some­where inside this bro­ken heart there is a love that con­tin­ues to burn. The flame flick­ers but never fades away, and this heart doesn’t know how to carry on.

Imag­ine a wounded heart, con­fused and unable to under­stand what has hap­pened. Imag­ine watch­ing help­lessly as its love is torn from its side. Imag­ine again find­ing its mate, and find­ing there is no longer a con­nec­tion between them. The time and dis­tance between the two hearts has burned away the mem­ory. Imag­ine try­ing to move on, and just when it begins to want to live again, it is dam­aged in another way.

Imag­ine a bleed­ing heart, bleed­ing from a bul­let wound in the chest. Crim­son tears flow from the pain of this wound and all of the old ones. All the heal­ing, the will to live that was only recently regained, every­thing is undone.

Imag­ine again the heart of the dying man. Imag­ine his thoughts and feel­ings as his heart slowed its beat­ing, giv­ing up its grip on life and slowly slip­ping away. Along this jour­ney, a heart blos­soms and it wilts. The rose had just regained a whis­per of a new bud when it began to die. The doc­tors know all hearts should beat. The man knows the voy­age has been long. Will this heart beat again? Only it can know.