Cor. Kardia. Corazon. Coeur. 心. दिल.
The heart. I feel you first in my chest when I wake too early, ribs tight, pulse uneven, thrumming like a trapped bird.
Heart (n.): a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals that, by its rhythmic contraction, acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of blood.
Merriam-Webster says this.
Gray’s Anatomy calls you “somewhat conical.”
Both agree you are hollow.
Neither mention what you carry.
They do not say that you break.
They do not say that you remember.
After all, isn’t muscle memory a “thing”?
That’s what they call it.
I call it every scar I carry.
Every beat that refuses to forget.
The heart is rather a poetic instrument, no?
In perpetual motion. Until it’s not.
The first organ to develop.
The last to surrender.
I felt you knot the day I fell, scraped my knees, and someone held me tighter than the world demanded.
I felt you quake when my first goodbye arrived, unannounced.
Follow the heart, they say.
Yet how can I follow you, when you live within me?
You are not a road, because I carry you.
You are not a direction, because you are a pulse.
You have never pointed.
You have only insisted.
Unofficially, you are a symbol.
Always red. Symmetrical. Obedient.
Something you can draw in two sweeping love-filled strokes.
Heart (n.): a symbol used to represent love, emotion, and affection.
But you are more than a metaphor.
You are more than a picture.
You are work.
You always have been.
You are persistence when I hold back tears for fear someone will notice.
You are commitment when I return to practice after I want to quit.
You are consistency when I sleep late.
When I fail.
When I let life pass without notice.
You persist even when I forget.
Keeping time for me.
When I lose it.
I hear you in the quiet:
thump
hush
thrum
echo through ribs I cannot open.
You keep the beat of mornings and midnights I can never repay.
And still,
I give you poetry instead of thanks.
And still,
one day,
you will stop.
And I will wonder, in the silence that follows,
how I lived so long borrowing a life from you.
By Nyasa Gupta
The Roar 