Recovery process
The heart is mangled. She keeps it in the usual place, under a the bars of her ribs, the thick door of her sternum protecting it. It’s been this way for years, the limping beat, the off-kilter pitter-pat, the feeling of weakness when a new risk comes along, a person, a limping dog, a week of thinly drawn clouds against the sky.
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
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