This Isn't a Metaphor

Dear Nancy,

It finally happened last night, just like you said it might. I hadn’t imagined it would be so sudden, but I guess that kind of thing is hard to predict. Whatever. Point is, I’ve been thinking about you. It took me forever to clean it up, by the way, I guess I hadn’t considered that it would be such a mess, but I guess I also hadn’t considered that the heart is what’s, like, in charge of your blood, so, duh. Anyways, I hope you’re doing well, wherever you ended up. I guess I was just gonna put this letter on the porch or something, I don’t think the mailman would really know what to do with it. Well, that might not be true, actually, the mailmen are pretty resilient, huh? I think they’ve got some crazy slogan about being unstoppable, but that might be a lie someone once told me. I bet I remember those more than I remember the real things I’ve been taught half the time.

Anyways, that’s not important right now. I’m not writing you to tell you about the infallibility of the postal service, I actually wanted to tell you about how it happened, because, you know, there’s not a lot of people you can describe this kind of thing to before they start to worry about either your health or, like, your mental stability. Trust me, I’ve made that mistake before.

I had all of the symptoms you described – I had actually figured it was coming, my chest hurt like hell for a solid week before I noticed any changes, and I remembered what you said when it was happening to you. That was when I first started to think about you. I also started feeling really dizzy, like I was back in high school and super anaemic again. I only ever seemed to feel normal when I was sitting by the pond and watching the fish, so I spent a lot of time doing that. At first, I’d bring a sandwich or something out to eat with me, but I didn’t have an appetite for very long, and I started leaving the sandwich there for the animals pretty quickly. Then, after maybe a week of that, I started coughing really hard. Like, rib-cracking hard. Just like you had. I would cough, and cough, like there was something caught in my throat that I could never quite get out. Then, last night, when I was boiling water for tea, I coughed again, and something came away, and I looked down on the floor, and there was my heart, sitting there in a crazy puddle of blood.

Nothing anybody can tell you will prepare you for the sound of your own heart hitting the floor. I sort of wished you’d warned me about it or something, but I guess you didn’t really have time for it. And I didn’t have the towels for it. It was a total disaster, it left a huge stain on my hardwood floors. Gross.

What are you supposed to do with your heart, once you’ve coughed it up? You can’t put it back. And it wasn’t like it was still beating, it just sat in my hand like some benign thing, not like it was what had kept my blood moving for as long as I’d known. It made me kind of sick. I coughed a few more times, like my body thought there was more to give, but nothing came up except more blood. Is that gonna be a thing? I guess there’s nothing for my blood to do anymore, now that my heart is gone. And by ‘gone’ I mean sitting in a tupperware in my fridge and yes, I’m aware that’s gross and probably super unsanitary, but I have no idea what to do about it and honestly it's freaking me out a little bit and so I guess that’s why I’m writing you this letter. I wish I’d paid better attention when it happened to you, because it feels like something I might mess up if I don’t deal with it properly. Like, I should call someone to do a ceremony about it, but I don't know who, or what ceremony, and I've never been good at being intentional about anything. I’ve been researching what parents do with the placenta when their baby is born for inspiration, and I guess if you wanted to be poetic you could call this a kind of rebirth, but also it feels like a wildly different situation and that sounds like an obnoxious thing to tell someone whose heart is sitting in their fridge like a chicken breast. This feels like a death.

Should I burn it? I know I can’t get it cremated, because I’m not stupid enough to think that if I waltz into a crematorium with a heart wrapped in tissue paper and ask them to cremate it, there’s not going to be questions, and I know they wouldn’t believe me if I told them it’s mine, and I know that would become a whole thing. Is that the kind of thing you can burn at home, like charring a burger on the grill? If I tried to do the thing that the detectives do, like, boil it down into nothing, would that work? What do you do with heart-water? Pour it on your garden, maybe, I bet my plants would love the nutrients.

I guess I could bury it, if I wanted to give the nutrients to the plants. That feels like what a normal person would do with their own heart, if for whatever reason it found its way out of their body and onto the floor. Plant some nice flowers over it, maybe daisies or hydrangeas, or I guess I could make it a gravestone? That might be the best course of action.

I almost want to buy a jar of formaldehyde and put it in there, but again, people would wonder. Also, I’m not Mary Shelley, and I don’t know if I could pull it off. Besides, I don’t think I want to hang onto it. It died last night, I thnk. Can a heart die? If it can, it did, and it feels cruel to leave it in limbo like that. I think I want to let it rest.

Should I eat it? Is that a crazy morbid idea? Would that kill me? What happens if you eat your own heart? Would that be some kind of ouroboros situation? What did you do with yours? Can you even eat a heart? It’s a muscle, do you eat muscles? These questions might be better suited for the butcher down the road, but some things even professionals can’t answer.

Is this why you left?

It seems like something you would do. Some crazy, soul-searching quest, to see if there’s someone out there who can tell you what to do with your tupperware full of your own heart. Actually, you probably didn’t put yours in a tupperware, you probably put yours in one of those fancy cigar boxes you liked, or wrapped it in one of your antique silk scarves. Now that I think about it, I bet that’s what you did. You left so quickly after it happened, but somehow I never thought about why. But now that I’ve started thinking about it, I can’t stop. Maybe it was because you didn’t know what to do, maybe you were searching for whatever’s going to fill the hole your heart left behind, and now that I’ve started to think that way, I’m scared that’s going to happen to me next. I don’t want to leave, I’m happy here, I like it here. I don't want something I have no control over to push me away. But I guess if it does, maybe I'll try to find you again, if you'd let me.

Maybe I'll throw it in the pond and let the fishes have it. It was the only place I found any peace half the time. I actually don't think we have the kind that eat meat in the pond, but I don't know if that's important. I can read one of those poems I like, from that kids book we read together when we were little. It can be a ceremony if I want to be.

Anyways, I think this pen is about to run out of ink, and I don't really know how to end this letter. Wish me luck, I guess.

Love you always,

Agnes