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CW: cannibalism and bodily harm.
Your heart stopped cold when you were walking to school in knee-high snow the morning after your parents separated. Maybe because you didn’t zip that padded snowsuit all the way up and your fur scarf was in the wash and the windchill of -10°F nipped your neck and seeped down your ribcage. Maybe because all night you believed that things would be back to normal in the morning. Your heart stopped all of a sudden, and you knew it was aching to beat again, throbbing in your chest. They tell you that a stopped heart feels like a toothache.
What they don’t tell you is that you can live on. It gets colder in your extremities, your skin hardens, you get used to cold toes. Life goes on. You grow taller every year, and adults don’t really notice a child with a stopped heart because most children don’t use their hearts right anyways and come off as heartless. The pediatrician calls it an idiopathic case of stopped heart; maybe it’ll start working again when you grow up. Your mom repeats this every day until you go to college, where she calls once a week to ask, has your heart started again. When you get into the messy business of falling in love, your lovers don’t really notice because you attract people with messed-up hearts and they think yours is like theirs, maps of arteries crossed and capillaries broken in places, but beating and warm, blood gushing to their extremities. When things end, badly, they cry that you’ve got a useless heart stopped cold, unsuited for being with people, unable to feel.
At your last pediatrician visit, you’re twenty-two and he tells you there are options, glossy brochures for heart donation programs, university-sponsored electro-radiation trials, and the experimental cryo-CBT-combination-therapy. They all have risks, like dying. You look into heart donation, but it makes you queasy, taking on another person’s heart, their longings, memories, nightmares. One cold winter when your stopped heart aches so much you can’t bear it anymore, you take your heart out cold and leave it in Tupperware. In the morning, you cut off a quarter-inch slice to pan-fry with eggs and season it with salt and Szechuan peppercorn. For a week, you cook your heart in slow-simmered soups, and you digest your heart, feeling warm. As December becomes January, you feel something beating again in your stomach.
Author’s note:
I wanted to juxtapose two concepts: “stopped cold,” which implies a sudden malfunction or halt, and “the heart,” the organ that is often symbolic of emotions and the human experience. What happens when something essential inside of you stops but life goes on?
