In Flight
She cannot find a way to measure her heart. She first tries when she is seven, and thinks that you weigh it in scoops, the same way that her father sticks his arm down into a bag of potting soil to scoop out soft, warm bits of earth whenever he works patiently in the front yard on Saturday mornings.
When she was twelve — in bed, pretending to be asleep when she heard her mother’s footsteps on the carpeted floor outside of her room, the wood beneath being worn down, the sound of toes being imprinted onto the ground. The sound that makes its way through the gap between her closed bedroom door. Her heart beats in tune with her mother’s steps, so she tries to keep count, measuring everything with the vibrations that reverberate in her chest.
At nineteen, this time in another city, where millions of hearts beat alongside hers. She can’t count the thumps anymore, there are too many sounds around her: the sounds of other people trying to find a way to measure their own hearts. Now she measures it in spoonfuls, the same size as the spoon the blonde barista in the coffee shop uses when he sprinkles flakes of dark chocolate over the whipped cream, which melts before it even touches her lips. It is easier to weigh a heart when it can be broken up into a size that fits neatly into the palm of her hand.
Twenty-three: motionless on a hospital bed on the other side of the world. She counts the drips from the fluid bag that is attached to her wrist, hoping that when the bag finally empties, she will still have enough heart left for everything that comes next.
I have tried to pick it apart, dissect it, open myself up on the operating table in my dream, all to make sense of this thing that everyone says is keeping me alive. And yet, I cannot make sense of my own heart.
When I was little girl lying still and quiet in my tiny bed on Sunday mornings, the universe thought that I was fast asleep. It thought I was listening to my mother’s footsteps in the hall. Or keeping rhythm with the thumping in my chest.
Let the universe believe what it wants. It didn’t know that what I was actually doing was watching. Watching the songbird that came to my windowsill and sang out for its friend. The hawk that soared above the treetops of our back yard, silently watching as the rest of the creatures below kept on living. A seagull that knew what it is to be free, to fly uninhibited, with nothing to hold it back. Nothing to weigh it down.
The universe didn’t know that what I was actually doing was this: waiting. Waiting, patiently. Waiting, secretly.
Waiting to take flight.
She turns twenty-six. Sits in front of the blue glare of a computer screen, pulls at the bit of skin under her chin, tugs at her neck, grabs at her lip. Looks for a way to unzip her body.
She thinks that if she could just find a way to open herself up, to pull apart her flesh into two pieces — she imagines that it will feel the same to her as it does to a banana whose peel is being stripped from itself — so that she can finally see what’s inside.
She wants to pull back the layer of skin from skeleton, spooning out the intestines, hold her muscles in her palms, the way a child holds a wad of plastic straws when he pulls them out of a picnic basket. And pluck apart her veins and arteries with her fingertips, and let the blood dry underneath her long nails.
Once there’s nothing left, she pictures herself scooping out her heart, leaving it in a surgical pan. She imagines the sound it will make when it hits the steel bottom plate of the pan: loud, yet malleable — the exact sound that you would expect when you dropped a rock down from the fifth floor of an apartment building.
And then?
Sew herself back up. Not heartless — just weightless.
She does not want to measure her heart. The head, the heart: they belong in a world for humans. She imagines herself elsewhere.
To get there, she can’t carry such tonnage in her body. Instead, she needs buoyancy, so that she can run down the city blocks, hop across sidewalks, skip over crosswalks and —
lift up,
take off,
look up to the heavens.
Or wherever it is that she wants to go.
She thinks of what it will be like to gut herself open, and then after it’s all said done, to glue herself back together again. This time, she will be more careful. She imagines how delicately she will place the feathers on her body, layering one upon the other, smoothing them down softly with her hands.
And once she replaces flesh with feather, it will not matter that she could not find a way to measure her heart. Where she is going, she doesn’t even need one.
At twenty-six, standing on the edge of the water, the sound of plastic paddle boats clunking against one another as they float over the black water of the Inner Harbor. She looks up to see another version of herself gliding up above: lightweight, levitating. Perpetually in flight.
In my next life, I will be a bird.
You might see me at your window, watching you fold your laundry on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps you’ll hear me sing out for you: a song for a friend, to tell you that I have come to take you back with me.
Or you’ll look up and see me in the sky, a speck of white that will blend in with the clouds — except for on sunny days, when my wingspan will let you see me sailing, effortlessly.
It will be easy to fly, with no pockets in which to tuck away a heavy heart.