I see a photograph of a human heart entirely drained of blood, its surface translucent. The aortic valve and pericardium membrane encapsulating the heart are a pale, pinkish beige just shy of white. One might be tempted to turn that bloodless heart into a metaphor for something, but a metaphor here would be too garish. Sometimes, a heart is just a heart.
*
I get a massage while still reeling from the death of a friend I’ve known since I was born. Neal was two months older than me, a piano prodigy and talented artist. He also used to push me into the public pool when we were kids, the chlorine-hot rush of water burning through my nose and down my throat as I thrash to resurface. I never do learn how to swim underwater without the security of plugging my nose.
I ask the massage therapist to increase the pressure on my forearms. Long days of typing leave them aching for relief. She explains that that particular topography of the arm is along the heart channel, and she doesn’t want to go deeper because that corridor is so vulnerable—connected, as it is, to the heart.
Halfway through the massage, the padded head cradle becomes wet against my face, and I realize I am crying. I’m embarrassed but the release is involuntary, primal, then uncontrollable. Afterward, I sit on my living room floor and sort through old boxes, setting aside photographs of Neal that his mom needs for the memorial service. I try not to let my tears spill onto images of him, of us, as we tumble our way through childhood, starting as bright-eyed babies shimmering with potential.
Later when I google heart channel—also called the heart meridian, I learn—I read that recently it was discovered that the heart contains an intelligence system with its own receptors, neurotransmitters, and electromagnetic force, all thought to be more complex than the brain.
*
Everywhere she goes, my friend Mireya’s young daughter carries not a stuffed animal or a doll, but a large, plush purple heart she calls mi corazón, often dragging it behind her small frame. They are inseparable, she and her heart.
*
I want to tell you about how the lashes of my stepdad’s belt on my eight-year-old body were not acts of a punishing love I wanted to accept. I don’t remember the pain, but my tears were less from the belt’s impact and more from the terror of anticipation, my helplessness to prevent it.
After he leaves, I curl up on the ground, or sometimes my twin bed, a crescent of self-pity. My mom slips into my bedroom and places her arms around me, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” as she cries, too. Pleading, “Just do what he tells you.” She doesn’t need to add that if I just did as I was told, didn’t make him mad, he wouldn’t be forced to punish me. I know this implicitly.
*
As an undergraduate, I work as a nude model for an oil painter in Albuquerque. I find the job ad in the classifieds section of a discarded newspaper on a table in Winning Coffee between philosophy and poetry classes. For the interview, I wear a jean skirt, Birkenstocks, and a brown T-shirt that says PEACE, but the painter, with his gray wisps of hair and gentle smile lined with age, doesn’t ask me to take off my clothes. He says my hands and untamed curls are nice as he makes us peppermint tea. We talk about gardening and music. His latest obsession is Imogen Heap; mine is Chavela Vargas. I’m hired.
At first, I struggle to maintain poses for long periods of time. I am too wholly and uncomfortably aware of the physicality of my body—my fingers fighting spasms from their fixed position, the itch on my thigh, the sunburn on my shoulders, the weight of my hair, my chapped lips pressing against each other. Then, I become so aware of my body that it dissolves, or I dissolve.
This is an avenue of meditation they don’t teach you. The painter’s voice is the hypnotist’s cue, conjuring me back to the temporal world, to the presence of my body separated once again from my thoughts.
I’m not always sure I want to return.
*
A few years later, a boyfriend rekindles my love for playing chess, teaching me the strategy I’d never grasped when I learned from my stepdad as a child. I observe the elegance of chess pieces dancing with one another, how they can be orchestrated in dangerous collusion. “There is strength,” my boyfriend tells me, “in yielding.” You can’t shy away from bloodshed, from sacrifice. It’s sometimes necessary to relinquish even your most favored pieces. The game of chess pulls heavily on the language of war. Getting attached to, sentimental about, any individual piece can lead you to a fatal zugzwang and result in your downfall.
The king is your only god. Sometimes it’s your willingness to let your queen be killed in service to this god that enables your small, fierce pawns—unassuming in stature and so often underestimated—to defeat your opponent, even if it requires exchanging a bishop for a knight, a queen for a rook, until hardly any bodies are left standing on the board.
*
I edit an article about skin hunger—the longing for human contact, more sensual than sexual—and the following year when Covid-19 descends, I think frequently about that concept, the psychological toll this deprivation is taking on a global level. I consider my lifetime of hugs up to then, that casual intimacy I took for granted, and my body aches to be touched. When my father dies 2,000 miles across the country, I grieve in isolation, and it is five days before I touch another human.
Even decades after the brutal violence my father meted out to both my mom and my older sisters’ mom, the feat of mourning his death without the antidote of physical affection feels like a particular cruelty my heart can’t quite process. Family therapist Virginia Satir famously asserted, “We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth.” If that claim holds even a fraction of truth, where does that leave us? The night my father dies, my mom and my sisters’ mom gather, seated six feet apart around a fire in my mom’s backyard chiminea, to ruminate his death together after a heavy day of consoling us from afar. They have survived our father in more ways than one, with an enduring bond, four daughters, and a son between them, but none of us can hug each other in this moment when we need it most.
One night I have a dream that I visit my friend Lisa in Seattle, walking into her living room crowded with friends. With excitement, I approach to embrace her but she recoils, furious, as the onlookers share her anger and dismay. How dare I try to hug Lisa—was I trying to kill her? It dawns on me that we are in the midst of a pandemic, a vaccine still months away from being developed, and I’m so overcome with shame and regret that I apologize profusely and beg her forgiveness. My reckless attempt to hug her is irredeemable, and everyone who witnesses this disgraceful act will always remember me with condemnation. In this dreamscape, I am the reviled antagonist.
*
A body is not always your own. It can be colonized against your will and its reclamation can look like many things. For me as a young twentysomething, reclamation can look like undressing three mornings a week in an adobe studio in the North Valley to offer my body as a man paints it in exchange for money to pay my rent.
It can begin with my naked body trembling because I’m repulsed by these bones and skin, but eventually I breathe into its angles, capitulate to its imperfections, and own my discomfort. I don’t learn to love it, but I learn to live with it and appreciate its utility. It’s the only body I get.
*
Not long after I stop working as a nude model and move to Portland, I get my first tattoo, a colorful piece that stretches across my back and wraps onto my left arm. It takes three and a half hours to complete, adrenaline flashing through my body like fireworks. My back, with its uneven curvature where mild scoliosis faintly slopes my spine, is still healing from a grisly network of dark purple sutures after the excision of five moles—only one that proves to be precancerous—and I am desperate to impose beauty around that unchosen battleground.
*
My friend Matt once told me that no one cares about dreams except the person having them. Perhaps we all had iterations of my hugging dream—we were all living that nightmare—and perhaps that makes it ok to acknowledge this dream, our bodies collectively and unwillingly weaponized in ways we can only now begin to comprehend, years after the pandemic began. Each of us a potential vehicle of chronic illness and death.
My father died in Abilene, Texas, which Google Maps tells me is, in fact, 1,844 miles from Portland, Oregon, via the fastest calculable route by car. The specificity felt inconsequential, so I rounded up to 2,000 miles, which could be perceived as an irresponsible inflation. But the details of this story are mine to divulge.
I don’t actually know if the stuffed heart my friend’s daughter clung to was purple; I heard the story secondhand, and if a color was mentioned, I didn’t retain it. There is no such thing as a reliable narrator. But I wanted that image to be more vivid, and a plush purple heart contributed well to the alliteration of that line, and the innocence of purple seemed preferable to the cliché pink or red you might have otherwise summoned. How would omitting the color have subtly shifted your ability to imagine that little girl and her corazón, affected your response to it? What if it were a plush green heart, a black one?
My childhood friend was fifty-one days older than me, not two months. This precision does not change the fact that Neal died before his thirty-second birthday after a losing battle with addiction and mental illness.
I don’t recall when my stepdad first used his belt on me, or how old I was when he stopped. I can’t recall the infractions that provoked this form of punishment, or how many times he wielded his leather strap. Would it have made a difference whether it was three times or thirty? It wasn’t often. I did try so hard not to upset him, to maintain that precarious equilibrium in our home. I did try.
If I had decided to extend—rather than eschew—metaphor, and had described that bloodless human heart as a grotesque spectral sculpture, or an alien planet emulating human life, would you have still been willing to agree that a heart is just a heart, or would you have resisted that claim, felt compelled to ascribe a more poetic nuance to it? In manufacturing detail, where is the line between emotional manipulation and justifiable embellishment?
*
I grapple with the implications of this distinction in every sentence I write, reaching for the truth of my experiences but also the truth my body holds. These aren’t always the same thing. As I retrace my words, I see in every recounting a delicate game of chess I navigate with caution, seeking to minimize the damage with a sentimentality I can’t surrender. I navigate with tenderness, too, for the me who didn’t always have autonomy over my body or the immunity to tell my story. I’m still learning to reclaim those rights.
I discover that getting tattooed is an exquisite form of pain that centers my body and reconnects it to the world. This, too, is a meditation. A yielding but also a reclamation. A fusing. I get to choose how my skin is adorned, how ink can be in conversation with the scars I’ve accumulated from surgeries and burns, earned from bike crashes and incidental encounters with sharp objects, from inhabiting a body in the world. Even when my flesh stings from the buzzing tattoo machine carving pigments into a sensitive swatch of skin, I relish in it. I have induced it of my own volition.
*
The passing of time has softened my stepdad in ways I’d never imagined possible. Although I don’t have memories of him smiling—let alone laughing—when I was growing up, these days he laughs easily, gruff but genuine. I wonder if a part of him is trying to make up for all the years he didn’t let himself.
He lives alone now with five dogs, three cats, and a family of gray foxes he looks after. My relationship with him mainly orbits around innocuous and infrequent conversations about his senior softball league, my younger sister, and his farm where I was raised in the rural valley along the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. At sixty-eight years old, he still irrigates the pecan orchards himself, not far from the land his grandfather farmed before him. I occasionally try to cajole him into playing chess with me through an app, but he declines.
There is a galaxy of topics my stepdad and I don’t discuss—which, yes, includes the tattoos decorating my body from ankle to shoulder, my former work as a nude model, and the spankings he doled out when I was little, echoes of the harsher corporal punishments he received himself as a child. We try to protect each other through this evasion, an imperfect strategy that feels critical to preserving our stasis: the sacrifice of deep authenticity for peaceful coexistence.
In our most recent phone conversation, my stepdad tells me about Güero (the latest stray dog he’s rescued, a white Great Pyrenees) and complains about the roadrunners’ relentless preying on baby quail, an ongoing source of aggravation for him on the farm—even more so than the coyotes. He jokingly threatens to shoot the roadrunners, but I know he won’t.
The truth is, I refer to him as my stepdad for clarity, to differentiate him from my biological father, but I call him Dad. And though I don’t share his genetics, though our history is complicated and rippled with emotional scar tissue, he is. As our conversation winds down and we exchange goodbyes, my dad tells me he loves me, and I believe him.
*
The next evening, I meet my friend Dani for ramen. She is the person who told me, years ago, about our friend’s daughter and her plush corazón. I ask Dani if she can recall what color it was. “No,” she says thoughtfully. “I don’t remember exactly what it looked like, but the wild thing is that it was anatomically correct—the shape of it and the colors, too. Like the realistic colors of internal organs.”
When I tell her how the broad strokes of that scene have lingered with me inexplicably after all these years, she just nods her head. We’ve been friends since first grade and have been there for each other through every step in the decades since. As I sip sake and she sips water, we talk about how much unwitting damage parents can inflict upon their children, and what responsibility we have to shield the people we love who have harmed us.
I hug Dani outside her apartment and walk the three blocks home in a chilly mist of rain. When I get to my front porch, I find an audio message she sent me. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful about the color of her stuffed heart. But I encourage you to take artistic liberties,” she says. And I do.
*
A few months later, after a chest X-ray revealed a growth, followed by a CT scan with an intravenous injection of contrast dye, I’m diagnosed with a pericardial cyst, just over 1.5″ long, growing in the pericardial membrane of my heart and pushing into my right lung. I read that pericardial cysts are congenital and rare, occurring in roughly one in 100,000 people. Only about forty-two people in the entire state of Oregon have one, based on my frantic calculations. This brings me no comfort.
I think back to the photograph of the human heart, and imagine the cyst—my cyst—nestled in the bloodless pericardium I had first written about years before I’d ever heard of pericardial cysts. Beginning in the 1940s, doctors called pericardial cysts “spring water cysts” because they’re typically filled with a clear fluid, as opposed to the more muscular anatomy of cancerous growths. That charming detail makes me feel only slightly more amenable to this fluid-filled sac growing inside my heart at a rate my cardiologist has yet to determine.
I am deeply relieved to learn I avoided cancer, the possibility of which I sat with anxiously before I received the results of my first CT scan—both my parents having battled cancer, and only my mom having survived it—but I’m agitated by the reality of contending with a rare medical condition. It’s also an unsettling addition to the large cluster of painful fibroids in my uterus (which caused near-catastrophic bleeding until a diagnosis led to treatment I’m still managing today), and the collection of small growths called pingueculae on the white part of my eyes—a relic of growing up in the severe New Mexican sunlight. Too many unwelcome comrades are taking up residence in my organs.
For now, I have no choice but to live with the unknown, a fraught emotional limbo while I wait for time to pass as my cardiologist charts the growth of my pericardial cyst. I acquire a new vocabulary of medical terms and spectrum of experiences, like getting twelve electrodes attached to my chest, arms, and legs for an electrocardiogram to record the electrical signals in my heart. When I look down across my body, every electrode is affixed on or near a tattoo.
My electrocardiogram results look like a topographic map of some strange terrain or a cryptic sheet of music. I ask my cardiologist if I can keep it. That night, I prop it next to my desk as a reminder of how hard my heart is working to pump blood through my body, despite the invasion of the cyst. I don’t know what comes next. But this body that I drag along with me, or that drags me along, we’re in this together. Call it living, call it meditation, call it taking artistic liberties, but sometimes a heart is just a heart. And this heart, this body, is mine.
Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who lives in Oregon but grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Jessie’s short stories and poems have appeared in various literary journals and the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She co-authored the nonfiction book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution and won the 2024 Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com