Can You Hold This for a Second?

Can You Hold This for a Second?

A Heart that Won’t Stay in my Hands

Article by Mira Springer, art by Jake Greenblat

            II know people who hold their hearts in their hands or otherwise clutch them in a plastic shopping bag or a hard-backed suitcase or a small cooler. If I alone am responsible for holding mine, I worry that I will dig my fingers in too deep, and it will bruise easily. So instead of holding it, I toss it around like a hacky sack or a wiffle ball.   

I throw it as hard as I can from the pitcher's mound, and if you don't catch it, it will burst in the dirt and get all dusty. Throwing it takes strength, but when my heart is beating feebly and coughing up dust on the ground, it doesn't feel like strength.

         Sometimes when I toss my heart up in the air, it falls and splatters on the black stage floor and a couple of veins burst. Blood leaks out, slowly trickling toward the audience. Some crane their necks to look at it with keen interest, others recoil in disgust. Under the stage light, my heart has eyes that glitter and ask if anyone knows how to hold it.

Other times I let it slip through my fingers onto the page and say “whoops!” as if this is not what I meant to have happen all along. The red blood looks like a child’s finger painting. Greens and yellows and blues come oozing out too. It sits there, spread wide across the paper, and waits for someone to wander by and pay it some attention.