Just thinking about this time last year...

... when I wrote this poem/thing. It's somewhere between short short story and prose poem, but in any case, I always liked how it turned out, and running with the dogs just now made me think of it. I hope you like it too.

Heart

We run north, towards the woods, and the colors are breathtaking. The change of the seasons has created a landscape collage of competing eras—the sky is saturated with the pastel blue of a Technicolor film, but the leaves and the earth are a rusty, sepia brown reminiscent of old family photographs. It is too late in the season for burning leaves, and the subtle smells of withering autumn register in my brain. I smell dirt. Soggy wood. The lurking cold that will surely have pounced on us before we get the chance to run again.

We chit-chat, but we both know that our words carry little importance. We are out for the sheer joy of being out, of being alive, of feeling the blood pulsing beneath our skin. We are strong and healthy, and we are looking at the world.

* * * * *

The human heart is divided into halves. The left side of the heart pumps oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to feed the rest of the body. The right side collects the body’s oxygen-depleted blood and channels it to the lungs so that it may be replenished.

These compartments are of course finite, and as one expands, the other must necessarily contract in order to make space. Like the joys and the sorrows it undergoes, the heart is at once consistent and fluctuating. As surely as blood rushes from one chamber to another, fullness and contentment inevitably cede to emptiness and melancholy.

Our whole lives are regulated by this constant circulation; our sentiments ebb and flow only because our ventricles propel and replenish as they should. We are machines with swirling emotions. We can choose to let our hearts beat quickly or slowly, and we can choose how much life we transmit through our bodies.

Breathe in—fill your chest with cold autumn air and beauty and joy. Breathe out— revel in the empty space, the hollowness. We are alone, and we cannot inhale forever, but we are strong, and we will inhale again.

* * * * *

We press on through the woods, the leaves crunching dully under our feet, my breath coming in regular puffs of dissipating fog. This is the last warm day of autumn, and already I anticipate the first warm day of spring. We will lace up our shoes and take to the road, relishing the stinging in our legs that comes from frosty air and rusty muscles. As surely as winter makes the earth inhospitable, spring brings us back amongst the trees, on our path. Autumn and spring, fulfillment and discontent, blood and oxygen, vacillating like a beating heart.