VOICES OF HEARTBEATS

Voices of Heartbeats

The unbuilding and building of self

1 I’m used to irregularities in my heartbeats. In elementary school, we were required to take an electrocardiogram for swim lessons, and I was told I had myocarditis. Apart from my fear of visiting the hospital after school and my dad’s inquiry calls to doctors, I only remember taking pills made in Canada and being banned from P.E. in my Chinese public school. “Don’t worry,” he said, and I believed him because everything in my life continued just the way it was.

But even then, I could hear my heart inside my left chest. Whenever I see, touch, hear, taste, and smell, I feel her breath like a song, a calling, a sixth sense—speaking to me the voices and frequencies of my own body. Thump. Thu-mp. Thump-thu-mp. Thump.

She speeds up as if fast-forwarding time whenever I’m nervous and chokes whenever I’m overcome by sadness, as if I’ve broken her by poking bullet holes and closing valves that send warmth to my hands and tears. Every strand of feeling I experience—fear, longing, jealousy, hope—she documents them for me in her own ways. She echoes what I hear—drums in my earphones, squeaks of shattering autumn leaves, dripping of rainy water—and keeps them within me. Even when I write these letters, she’s still recording. Something. Everything. Thump. Thu-mp. Thump-thump.

2 Maybe she’s trying to show me how my life has never stopped—burning its fibers every second as I draw with the ashes, creating colors with black and white. Every emotion, every time I stop and zoom in with my phone camera and try to capture the smell of wind and the colors I see—she experiences them as I do. Every time I choose not to speak my heart, I bear the burning burden weighed on her. Thumpthumpthump. She preserves who I am. She touches what makes me. She is what makes me.

3 Last year, my heart would occasionally beat too fast to the point where I couldn’t hear anything else. When I slept, she seemed to vibrate with my bedsheets to create a kind of imprisoning warmth. Thump. Thump-thu-mp. Thu-mp. I closed my eyes and it became louder, clearer.

When I went back home to China this summer, I finally decided to go to a cardiologist. I always hated visiting hospitals, but the streams of Chinese people swimming past me and their mixture of Chinese dialects soaked me in a misplaced, irresistible sense of belonging and security. The cardiologist ordered me to wear a Holter monitor, which tracked my heart’s rhythm for 24 hours. When I crawled into bed at 12 a.m. that night—anxious about having to get up at 6 a.m. to return the Holter, chest and skin glued with white electrodes, body tangled in gray wires that transferred my heartbeats to a small black box I wore on my waist—I suddenly hoped that this machine recorded my thoughts instead. I think of too many new things every day and forget even more.

4 But aren’t my heartbeats my thoughts— merely in another language? One that’s both simple and complicated; one that’s written in endless versions across the world, but for which the world doesn’t have any dictionary. Heartbeat is a human’s most intrinsic, purest voice. To others, to ourselves. An embrace is a conversation between hearts and can never be defined by any human-made artificiality.

Sometimes I wish she could speak for me. Sometimes I let her speak.

5 Thumpthump. Thumpthumpthump. THUMP. THU-MP. Thump-THUMP-thump.

6 Last year during finals, her voice grew louder and louder. I called health services and was transferred to a nearby hospital’s line, which told me to call 911 if it became more severe. I said “thank you” repeatedly, monotonously, in a rhythm more stable than my heartbeat, and hung up with a face straining both disbelief and fear.

I lay in bed and thought about what to do. I couldn’t bear that I was technically doing nothing and opened a book due a few days later for an English literature class. I read and thought I must be out of my mind and kept on reading. “What are you doing,” I told myself. “Stop now if you don’t want a heart attack,” I told myself over and over again but couldn’t hear a thing.

The only thing I could hear was my heart beating. Thump. I didn’t know what was wrong with me but I wanted to. Thumpthump. It was like someone else was living inside me. Someone who wanted to stop. Thumpthumpthump. For all my life, I’ve feared change and unfamiliarity— feared visiting the hospital instead of going home after school, feared being diagnosed with some heart disease that would disrupt what life used to be, feared sharing my heart’s voice with someone who doesn’t recognize her roots. Thumpthumpthumpthump. But maybe she knew better.

7 I went to health services the next day and the nurse kept saying things like, “You are already doing great by getting into this school.” I kept on nodding and nodding. A doctor thump came later thumpthump and listened to my heartbeats thumpthumpthump.

“No wonder why you are not feeling well. Your heart is beating really fast,” she said. I nodded and smiled. I selfishly wished she could tell me what my heart was saying, but I knew she couldn’t. Thumpthumpthumpthump. I knew only I could.

She taught me to breathe through my stomach. Thumpthumpthumpthump. She placed her hand on my belly and told me to concentrate on inflating it when I breathed in and deflating it when I breathed out. Thumpthumpthump. “Do you feel your heartbeat slowing down? You can keep doing this whenever you feel that your heart beats too fast,” she said while helping me breathe. Thump. Thump. ”It restarts your heartbeat.” Thump. 8 I sunk into an addiction of restarting her. An addiction to her absence, to a world that suddenly becomes quiet—quieter—even for just a split second. In those split seconds I try to envision a world without her voice. Without her, even. I breathe and breathe again to erase everything I don’t want in my life: every change I encounter, every unfamiliarity she unreservedly magnifies for me.

In those silences I escape—unliving the past, searching for a point in life where I can merely discard all changes as easily as pressing the “revert to original” button in the photo album on my phone.

9 But isn’t silence a sound? In high school, a journal prompt urged me to describe the sound of silence, and I sat in front of my desk at 3 a.m., trying to figure out its texture while only hearing my heart beating. When the whole world stopped talking to me, only she persisted.

She speaks no matter if I can hear her or not. Even when I restart her to live through a few milliseconds of silence, I listen to a world of her creation. I am her creation. The absence that I long for is enabled by her existence.

And there’s no escape—no unliving what I’ve lived, no discarding any changes—only doses of anesthetic I take to mask my cowardice. My unwillingness to accept life as it is. My inability to embrace myself as I am, to hold onto and let go of others.

10 My Holter result said I had premature atrial contractions. Now her voice has a name.

The cardiologist looked at the result and said the frequency was not too high, so I didn’t have to worry. “The only thing is that sometimes you might feel unwell—but this won’t affect how long you’ll live,” he said.

I nodded. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Shouldn’t I feel relieved? Everything would go the way it was. I stood in the hospital hallway, saturating myself as much as I could with the sense of familiarity that didn’t belong there, and focused on the beating of my heart: Thump. Thump-Thump. Thump. All this time, I’ve longed to know the meaning of her words, but perhaps that’s not what I should discern. Perhaps listening is more important.

My heart reflects and embraces all that I experience yet she stays who she is. She never changes but also never beats the same beat twice—even when I close my eyes and breathe hard to restart her, there’s no replay. No matter how much I fear changes, unexpectedness, unfamiliarity, abnormalcy, she preserves every second of our shared lives and beats ceaselessly into the future.

I need to listen for that future.

KATHY WANG B’25 wishes everyone robust and healthy heartbeats.