On my seventh birthday, my mother gives me a gift.
A small package wrapped in silk, a bow holding it together. I hold it in my hands, trying to hide my disappointment at its size. I was hoping for a puppy, or even a new lego set. As I look down at the diligently wrapped gift, I can feel its warmth through the fabric, and a slight pulsation fills my hand. I feel my mother’s anxious stare as I carefully open the gift.
Inside, a pulsating heart stares up at me. I don’t know what to do with it, so I look to my mother, who takes it from my hand and presses it against the hole in my chest. Once it's fully in its cavity, she takes a needle and thread and gently stitches my chest back together, not once looking me in the eye.
We never again talk about this.
As time goes by, the heart beats faster and faster, uncomfortable against my chest, as if trying to escape my body. I want it gone, but when I ask my mother to remove it, she stares at me blankly, as if she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. I try showing her my stitches, but the gnarly scar is gone. “I can’t take your heart away silly, it's a part of you.”, she says, but I know she’s the one who did this to me.
I grow older and the heart in my chest grows rotten and mean, its incessant beating making me bruised and tired. It beats fast and hard, as if trying to escape my body, greedy for more than I can offer. I grow rotten and mean too, resenting my mother for forcing this cursed heart onto me.
One day, I finally can't stand it anymore. I dig a hole in the garden, in between the vegetable patch and the dog’s grave. Sticking my fingers down my throat, I force myself to vomit out the heart. As it falls on the ground, it pulses a few times, the blood mixing itself with the dirt surrounding it. Out of my body, it suddenly seems so small and
harmless, taking its last cowardly breaths before stopping completely. I hastily cover it with dirt, swallowing back the guilt and bile.
I walk away and don’t look back to the heart’s unmarked grave.
After this, things get easier. I pack my bags and cross the ocean, looking for the right size pebble to fill the empty ache in my chest. When I fall and scrape my knees, I no longer run to my mother’s lap. I get myself back up and ignore the sharp pain until it grows into a disfigured scar.
I find a smooth dark rock and glue it to the space in my chest, pretending the cold sensation doesn’t feel foreign against the warmth of my body. I surround myself with shiny trinkets and glowing artifacts, growing my own precariously built nest to keep me warm during the winter.
In spite of all my efforts, when the winter does come, it tears down the fortress I built myself in one swift sweep of the stormy winds, leaving me bare and alone against the cold. The stone I used as a makeshift heart is nowhere to be found, swept by the harsh wind along with everything else. The ugly scars on my skin reflect the bright moonlight, and I can no longer look away. Suddenly I’m five again with a bleeding elbow and all I want to do is curl up against my mother and have her tell me it's ok. I curl up on the ground and cry out for her, hating myself every moment of it. Like a guilty dog, I lick my own wounds and pathetically try to comfort myself.
Eventually the storm clears. I pick myself up and let the moonlight guide me home. I no longer know how to measure the time that creeps on by, but eventually I can smell the scent of home in the distance. I cross the ocean and the desert and finally find myself back at my mother’s doorstep.
My bed is made and my stuffed animals have been washed and aired out, patiently waiting for me, displayed neatly by my pillows. I’m not a kid anymore, and I stand awkwardly tall, my neck uncomfortably bent against the ceiling, but I know I’m home. My mother makes me black beans and farofa and sits with me, watching me eat. She doesn’t say anything, but she tells me everything I need to hear.
Once I’m done, she takes me by the hand and guides me to the garden, patiently waiting as I try to dig up the heart I buried away so long ago. However, too much time has gone by, and the worms have devoured the sour little heart long ago. On my hands and knees I cry into the earth, my mother’s warm hand placed gently against my shoulder. I cry for weeks, my mother holding me tight. She holds me and the whole world around me, wrapping me in a blanket she weaved from the starry night sky.
When I have cried all my tears away, I waddle out of the lake I formed, soaking wet, and there she is, standing on the shore, waiting, hands stretched out towards me. As I come closer, I see in one of her hands my own beating heart, the red blood bright as it reflects the moon’s light. In her other hand she holds the same needle and thread from when I was a child. I wince as I wait for her to place it in my chest, but she stands there, motionless, until I reach out and carefully take the beating heart from her hand. It beats slowly and warmly against my palm, and even though I know it is the same heart I buried away in disgust, this time it feels gentle and shy against my skin. I press it against my chest, as I vaguely remember my mother doing when I was a child, and use the needle and thread she hands me to close the bleeding wound in my skin. I turn to my mother and do the same to the gaping hole in her chest.
She smiles, and I see a glimpse of a human I know nothing of underneath my mother’s skin, so I take her hand and we walk towards the house, as she tells me of who she was before she was in a past life.
