Heart Under Scalpel

Car crashes, fruit pips, moving through water

I want badly to write about my love, but everything I write on it makes me screw up my face and shudder like I’ve heard an abrasive noise. The externalised words are so ill fitting to the feeling it becomes a cliched mockery, like putting plastic flowers in a contoured vase, or putting heritage roses in a plastic cup.

To me love is a notion which sits comfortably in the ether of the unexplained, it is the space between stars. I do not feel the need to expel it from my body like I do with the other unsavoury subjects of my writing. I’m happy for it to sit unknown in my body, like whatever is between my veins. And the manifestations of my love go similarly unobserved, with no curiosity to dissect them like a worm, or a rat, or whatever it was that you were given to learn anatomy in year 10 science class.

What I dissected was a sheep heart. So here is mine, laid out and pinned to the table, for the morbidly fascinated, scalpel-wielding student - locate the aorta, and see what you find underneath.

My current love, in the typical romantic sense, began feeling like the sound of a horn preceding a car crash. Tension growing in a sound too loud to go on for that long, screaming please see me, ending in collision, mangled limbs and metal.

I remember how foreign his face felt against mine. For a still moment my nose rested on his cheek, cheekbone above it, before our lips came into contact with the hesitant force of magnets - positive charge to positive charge repelling and gripping. Thoughts I then saved for the privacy of fading consciousness, that time between wake and sleep that isn't quite so dark yet.

For a long time these thoughts could force my eyes closed for dangerously long periods of time, while I was sitting at my desk, walking down the street, I wanted to grab on with both hands and think of nothing else again.

I wrote awful haikus

Caved in too early
Try again, again
This time it can’t last

Dangerous fortune
All I want to do is take
The next step with you

Eventually I gave up cutting down stray thoughts and followed them curiously to the corners of my mind. And I fell with the weakening grip of a sleepy hand attempting to grasp an early morning coffee. Nothing composed about it. Just a series of stumbles trying to regain balance and never managing to.

Then that winter, the one that felt like summer, it could never have been cold, it wouldn’t have made sense. It was his smell like sand on hot concrete in the late afternoon, sneaking in through my window after late nights out, everyone else asleep. Over those days under the low sun, the thoughts once exiled to the inside of a longing brain trickled down past the dusky horizon of my consciousness, like the limited and illusive images went through the opposite of a paper shredder and bought a person into 3D being, that I could touch and kiss and hold, for hours on end, until arms lose feeling and its hard to draw a boundary between us.

Cloud gazing at night
Everything will be alright
Even through the mess

Lying on my bed, laptop open, I had the overwhelming feeling that I wanted to grow out of that room with him. It suddenly felt childish, pink decorations, magazine centrefolds on the wall, him in his glasses, applying for university - I imagined the same glasses on his face years in the future, many beds and rooms away.

Now, on a bed floating on a London canal, it is the more granular fractions of shared existence, like raspberry pips stuck in our teeth as an evening separates us across the vortex of the city. And at the gig I will wonder why he bothered buying raspberries in winter, and he will not think of me, until he picks up his toothbrush and realises that I have used it again, despite his continued efforts to get me to stop.

It is egging each other on to finish whole blocks of chocolate, jump from higher rocks into water, quit our jobs and move to the Caribbean. Sometimes it is an inability to see, making exhausted adjustments, like sitting in the optometrists chair “better or worse?”, “better or worse?”.

Learning to move through life with another person is like learning to move through water. It is familiar, but far from a natural state. There is resistance against your limbs. Putting one foot in front of the other must be replaced by putting one arm in front of the other, or offer them both out front and pull back toward you. You feel sore in muscles you didn’t know you had; above your elbow, below the third rib on the left hand side - perhaps this is what the scalpel discovers. But what happens when you become adept at these new movements is that you gain a freedom which you did not possess before.

The kiss is still soft, like the inside of a plum, summer stone soft on the tongue. And eventually more things feel possible than you ever thought would be.