Two Hearts

My heart is inflamed. It demands to be known, felt, sitting heavy in my chest, making it hard to breathe.

The pain is central, right between my breasts, and it haunts me all day, a constant grieving. It is emphatic, specific: a tightness I try to push on, my fingers on my breastbone but cannot ease. It grips me like worry, like terror, like heartbreak.

It's from a virus, the doctor tells me. This can happen: a virus in your throat can run its course and seemingly be vanquished, but instead, it hides out, secreting itself somewhere else in your body, looking for purchase. And there it blooms, in the lining of your heart. Pericarditis, the heart lining inflamed, fighting, aching. It feels like a heart attack, right down to the pressure on your chest and the pain sometimes running down your arm, and the shortness of breath, but it is not a heart attack.

My brain doesn't know this. My brain hears these frantic calls from my heart and sounds the alarm. The panic makes it worse; the panic makes my angry heart angrier.

The cardiologist's office has machines that can reveal the secrets of my body. I lie on a table, on my left side, a rough gown draped over me, and a technician presses a plastic knob full of gel onto my breastbone, my breast. I hear the familiar, watery swish of the machine, and it reminds me of my first ultrasound when I was pregnant, the way I'd marveled at this tiny, fierce life inside me, the completeness of its world a mystery, the sounds of which I could only eavesdrop upon from time to time.

This time it is my own heart I am eavesdropping upon, and there it is, beating away, its own strong rhythm constant and utterly independent of my conscious direction. I feel awed and inordinately proud, the way one might feel inordinately proud of the earth, the life that grows on it, the way you might wade into the ocean and stumble upon a starfish or a crab and marvel at this secret life existing all the time without you and feeling proud somehow to be a part of it, privileged to have a glimpse of it. I feel for a moment about my heart the way I felt watching first my daughter, then my son roll over or take their first steps: good for you, look at you, look at the hard work you're doing. I am hearing my heart do its work, and for a moment I am humbled to realize this is the work it does all the time that I take for granted.

The tests reveal nothing out of the ordinary. My heart is strong, it pumps the way it should, the arteries and vessels are free of defect. What feels like a crisis is not a crisis. My brain can't tell the difference.

________

When she talks to me, she can't even say it. She can talk about staying up all night, about writing on scraps of paper she's assembled into a journal. She can talk about a revelation she's had, about a truth she's discovered about herself, about the relief it feels to know this truth, but she can't name it for me. She can't tell me what it is. It's too much.

It sounds like you're talking about identity, I say, to help her articulate it, and she says Yes—yes, exactly. I think I know what she's trying to tell me, but I try to mirror her approach, reflect her, come at it obliquely. We are able to talk about identity, we are able to talk about what it's like to be fifteen, a younger sibling; we are able to talk about the self, all without talking about what we're really talking about. My heart aches as I watch her struggle, hovering between excitement and fear, wanting to share something big with me, but also not wanting to break the spell of everything being normal.

Just sometime...