Heartfelt and True

Response to the Medium Magic prompt, “You are a heart personified. Tell us your thinking.”

I know the sayings about heartbreak, the acceptance that this is somehow a reality. I remember when your grandmother died and your grandfather passed from this world soon after. Everyone said he’d died of a broken heart. It’s something often said of an older spouse whose partner soon follows or a parent who buries a child and cannot continue.

Yet a heart doesn’t actually break. That is merely a figure of speech. I may one day weaken, slow, beat irregularly, and will most certainly, though hopefully not for many years, even stop, but I won’t become broken. That is saved for the bones or perhaps the teeth, but it doesn’t apply to muscle like me.

And while I may be made of just muscle tissue, I carry within me the knowledge of being. I am part of consciousness and part of what comprises personhood. Knowing does not just reside within the brain, nor does emotion. I am the true seat of emotion and while the brain may house more of what they call intellect, I am the source of understanding, of compassion, of empathy.

It is I that allows you to relate to others, to come to know them, to love them. Long before your brain ever developed the capacity to understand the attachment you felt to those you’ve lost, even in childhood, came from me. I enabled you to feel the warmth within you as they held you close. Even back then it was from me that the emotional need for those who gave you life originated.

So I suppose you can say the pain you are feeling now is my fault, but the capacity for feeling pain that is the same capacity that allows you to love as you do. The love for the parents you have lost so suddenly will come to assert itself over your grief and while not even I can ever completely alleviate the sense of loss you feel, one day a smile, instead of tears, will form whenever you think of them.

Until then, I will guard your love and keep watch as you sleep, steadily, steadily, beating on. Worry not, rest instead and when morning comes, when those moments of forgetfulness turn into forlorn memory, I will not break. I will remain constant until the day when morning brings not pain and weeping but instead brings memory’s smile and I will help fan that spark of hope into the glory of tomorrow.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured a several anthologies. She is the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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