Author: bumblebee3london

The Cardiologist told me this beautiful tale about our hearts. I love the stories he tells, because they are shrouded in Eastern esoteric knowledge, folklores from a bygone world and also cutting edge medical research. He tells these stories when we walk my beloved South Downs, the Itchen Valley of my youth, the magical New Forest, the streets of London and in distant countries by the sea.

Over the years, it seems to me that he straddles the realms and he seamlessly merges the knowledge together oh so beautifully, though in the beginning I doubted him. But I have seen his strange beliefs working, in me, in my beating heart: he had patiently rebuilt my heart muscles every single evening during the dark nights and days of 2015-2016, when I was too weak to climb the six flights of stairs up to my eyrie.  We ran along the Embankment by Battersea Bridge every winter evening with my heart hooked to his. I still don’t know whether his contraption really worked, but it was a lifeline that I clung on to until I found my my own in my rebuilt heart.

When my heart went into difficulties, it sought his to find its life-saving rhythm again. It trusted his to lead it out of the infinite loop that it found itself in, that it was unable to escape from without help from somewhere, someone. My belief in him saved me.

He would put his ear against my chest with a frown on his face. “Ah,” he would say mysteriously. Sometimes, a smile would flit across his face.  He told me that during his training in cardiology, he would tape the heartbeats of as many patients as he could find and play those heartbeats back to him on his Sony Walkman, permanently attached to his ears,  until he was fluent in the language that hearts speak.

“That’s why I don’t always hear what you say, Jac, especially when you are nagging,” he often joked, and then with seriousness, “But I hear your heart all the time.”

This is something beautiful he told me a few evenings ago in rainy London, sitting in a pub near where we used to run every evening.  He told me that when a person suffers emotional trauma, his heart shifts its position within the ribcage. It could be a few millimetres or even centimetres.  I guess that’s why it feels like a physical pain sometimes, when someone or something hurts us deeply.

“Is it possible for a heart to move physically?” I mused.

He who held beating hearts in his hands many times said “Yes” with utter conviction.  “The power of thought alone can move a robotic arm, so this is no different. Science will bear this view of mine out in a few years’ time.”

He said that his heart had shifted a lot in the year that his mother died (when he was eight) and the brutal years in an English boarding school that followed his mother’s early death. He grew up learning to live with his heart in a different place.

“But when I walked into your mother’s house for the very first time, when she opened her arms to me and smiled at me with that big smile of hers, I felt something move in me. It was my heart, Jac, going back to its original place.”

In a time when we are hurtling towards time-poverty, where things happen at a super-fast timescale, I would like to share something old-fashioned about deep connection with another person and the universe.

January 2017

Upon seeing this sunset from my balcony, we grabbed our picnic food, stuffed it into an old rucksack, and raced 600m to the beach. I think we were smiling as we walked single-file along the busy road leading to the seafront, amidst the traffic and pedestrians living their lives on the streets. I wanted to turn around and tell him this: “I am so incredibly happy to be with you.”

At the beach, just when the world was beginning to turn dusky pink by the setting sun, we fell into step next to each other and held hands. I love holding his hand. A thousand magical things happen whenever his fingers reach for mine.

We found a spot somewhere on the beach and laid down the picnic blanket. It was my old horse blanket, all tatty and memorable, but this was one of the rare occasions I did not think about my home in the Shires. I was here, fully present with this man who lit some long-buried fire in me.

As we sat down, his arms went round me and I moulded my body to his. I could feel him kissing my hair softly. Though the cloud had come in by now and obscured the display, we were lost in the beauty of the moment.

Until I broke the enchantment and moved away from him. ‘Your back,” I said. “You’ll strain your back bearing my weight.”

He was spooning me whilst sitting upright. And I thought about the spinous fibres of his erector spinae dancing alongside his spine, and his quadratus lumborum supporting my weight. He smiled teasingly at me – only a crazy woman would think about erector spinae and quadratus lumborum in a romantic moment like this – but he followed my lead anyway. We moved to a better spot. We found a tree that was just right for us, as its trunk concaved into a hollow into which his back fitted perfectly. I relaxed again, thinking about him in yoga class, on the mat beside me.

An aeon ago, before he became this special person to me, he had been a deeply familiar system of biological parts, subject to my mental dissection and intellectual exercise. He had entered my consciousness as a familiarity, and from then on, he weaved his individual and personalised magic in me. But I had thought about his body long before then, visualised its internal workings. I saw the architectural wonders of his body in my mind’s eye before I even first kissed his skin.

And here he was now, holding me in this enchanted space. He was touching my upper arm softly, like he was tracing the intricate network of arteries, veins and capillaries beneath my skin, subcutaneous layer, connective tissues and muscles. “So soft,” he breathed, watching my face in the fading light. At that moment in time, I thought it was the most perfect moment ever. The world around us faded into a distant blur – the Russian tourists, the Chinese chatter, the beach dogs, the whole world. All that was left was just he and I alone in this vast and magical universe.

It was as if some deep part of me was waiting for this man to breathe fire into my inner being. His molecules – the signature of his essence – somehow fitted in the intricate 3-D molecular structures within me, catalysing a waterfall of beautiful reactions. It is said that emotions arise from the synapses in the brain, but I am not so sure. I felt a visceral reaction deep within me at the taste of him.

We ate goat’s cheese and sundried tomatoes. And sticky mango rice. I tasted that on his lips, his tongue, his saliva, and felt all the parts of me that was capable of expressing joy coming alive, coming to glorious life.

And reading the book by Sophie Sabbage about the art of living on borrowed time, I thought, how exquisite it is to feel and to love deeply. Indeed, we don’t ‘fall’ in love. We rise. We are more, not less, of ourselves in its presence. We are uplifted, not laid low.

And thus we live; we really live.