hearts

When I was a kid, I went to my neighbor’s birthday party. It was in the rock-climbing area of the local Lifetime Fitness. My parents were there, though my mother didn’t want my father to come for some reason, unbeknownst to me. He came anyway, in his worn, gray Nike shirt.

My dad used to be a big man. He ate ice cream, cake, burgers, chocolate, ribs, red meat, cream, tea with milk, pizza bent like a sandwich, hot dogs. He wasn’t always fat, and he isn’t fat now, not anymore. There are pictures of him as a teenager, skinny with a trimmed afro and no beard. You can see a dark mole on his upper lip. He has a beard now and doesn’t shave it often. I like him best with his beard and with cow-licked, bedhead hair, but he shaves that too sometimes. When I was a kid, he was skinny, then fat, then skinny, then fat like he was cycling through weight.

At the birthday party, I was eight years old and my dad was on the top of the weight cycle, big with a round tummy and soft cheeks. Neither of us had rock-climbed before, but we were both intrigued. I climbed the kiddy wall, afraid of what it would feel like to fall halfway from the tall ceiling, made even taller in my child mind. The colorful notches screwed in the wall were cold and strange in my hands, I remember feeling my heartbeat hard and fast behind my lungs, a feeling I’m so familiar with.

My dad was one of the first adults to climb that day, as the kids were getting tired and whining about birthday cake and gifts. My dad climbed up the brown wall with a big curve, like he was Spiderman climbing on a miniature ceiling, all the way up up up and then descending, slowly, with pain in his left arm.

The birthday boy’s mom was a nurse and called an ambulance. Nobody told me what was happening, I just remember the big glass window separating me from my mother, watching her climb into the front seat of an ambulance in flip flops, her black hair loose around her shoulders.

A heart attack is defined by mayo clinic as a blockage of blood to the heart, usually by fat or cholesterol. I don’t want my heart to be blocked up like my father’s. When I eat fatty foods like red meat or butter or cream, I imagine a little brick being added to a miniscule wall in my arteries. Like one day, the wall will be finished, and I’ll fall down with a great pain in my heart and no more flowing blood. A dam of fat in my veins.

I imagine a lot of things will happen to me because they happened to family members. I’ll have a heart attack, like my dad. I’ll have to have hand surgery to repair an immovable finger, like my grandma. I’ll have to get blood transfusions because my insides burst, like my uncle and my dad. I’ll get diabetes like three fourths of my grandparents. I don’t know why I think so much of my life is written in stone like that. You could say it’s intergenerational trauma.

My dad was okay. He had a surgery and I remember vague smudges of words. A tiny scar on his leg, a tube, heart disease. I ask my dad today, “Do you have heart disease?”

“Sort of,” he says, “my heart works better now. I don’t know if I still have it.” He’s a man of few words.

Is heart disease something you can grow out of? I put a pin in this strange metaphor of a diseased heart healing.

*

I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with the motions of hearts. Not just my own, but every one’s hearts. I press my fingers to my dog’s armpit and feel her heartbeat while she sleeps on my bed. I smile with a strange childlike glee, like we’re sharing a secret. I feel my cat’s heartbeat, too. He lays next to me, and I marvel at the quickness of his teeny, elderly heart. I compare it to mine, pushing my fingers under my jaw. If my heartbeat is thick, my cat’s is delicate, quick and thin.

I like to lay on my fiancé’s chest and hear his heartbeat, too. I close my eyes and imagine a dark red room with blood flowing around me, bubbling and calming. Once I tried to put my fingers under his jaw to feel it more intensely. “What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m trying to feel your heartbeat.”

He laughed, “Stop that.” I laughed feeling a little disappointed. I’m not good at feeling heartbeats in the wrists, I think my fingers are too callous and the flow is too subtle.

In Monk, Monk discovered a man was pretending to be a doctor when he used his thumb to check for a woman’s heartbeat on her dainty wrist. “Thumbs have heartbeats, you’d get confused which is which,” he said. Doesn’t each body part have a heartbeat? Still, I press my thumbs down hard to feel their swirled pulses.

Once in 10th grade anatomy, the blonde girl who sat behind me asked our teacher if each heartbeat is different, like a fingerprint. I don’t remember what he said, but I like to think my heart is in sync with a handful of strangers, connected through the soft drum beat in our flesh.

The other day I was laying, in bed mindlessly scrolling through the endless depths of Instagram. I came across a minute-long video of a little turtle who was born with its tiny heart exposed. I watched the purple mass pulse in and out of the chest of its shell, intrigued and disgusted.

I think of my own heart, a tumor of muscle and blood. Lately when I go to sleep, I feel my heart beat a smooth and steady tune in my chest. When I focus, I become my heartbeat. I feel it everywhere. I go through a checklist of locations in my body, feeling my heartbeat in each one; shoulders, neck, finger tips, feet, knees, forearms. I am my heartbeat, red and thick and feeling.