It still beats

Years ago now — in what feels like another lifetime — I taught English in the Mississippi Delta.

It tore my heart out.

I’ll spare you the details of the inequities of our education system, but stop you at the part where I was teaching 8th graders, in compulsory summer school, to bask in the glow of a feel-good short story…

…just kidding. We were reading “The Tell Tale Heart”.

A story of paranoia, guilt and anxiety. Of begrudging confession. One that blurs the lines of what’s real and what’s not.

Never did I think I’d equate this experience to my love life. And yet, here I am.

Edgar Allen Poe.

The man who coined “once upon a midnight dreary”. (Nope, not Blues Traveler. Maybe TSwift, too, found inspiration in the melancholy?) The one with a chip on his shoulder…or a raven, at least (on that, another time).

Monuments — and bars — now built in his honor, taking me back to my latest jaunt in Charleston, South Carolina. A curious man who barely saw fame in his lifetime. He probably asked a million “what ifs”…and then poured them into his writing. As if it could keep him warm.

I’m less interested in his story — despite this overture — and more interested in that damn beating heart.

Under the floorboards.
Just audible enough to haunt; quiet enough to question.

This beating heart feels a lot like unwelcome thoughts. Pervasive. Invasive. And where the hell are they coming from?

The strongest urge is to silence them — naturally, they’re creepy AF. Easier said than done.

When they continue to pester us, uninvited, we may search for answers. To find the source.

This pursuit — in vain — only takes us to our own complicity in our demise.

The thoughts. Unchecked.
Force us to examine our own guilt…our own role…in our undoing.

A beating heart.
Buried deep.
Real or imagined?

Ok, now for a confession (no, I didn’t murder anyone). I’m a heartbroken mess.

The kind where sanity is questioned.
Where what’s real and what’s imagined is hopelessly obscured.

Questions are asked to an empty room.
Answers are futile.

The fear of uncovering what’s hidden beneath keeps me pacing, manically, in avoidance of what the noise is actually masking.

Maybe we all hear something, softly, in the cacophony of our worlds.

It beckons us to see things honestly. To take accountability. To hear the things we don’t want to hear.

The mess of our actions.
The pain of our choices.
The reality of our decisions.

When we rip up the floorboards, we see ourselves.
Our own corpse.
Our own redemption.

But when we do, does the heart stop beating?
The stories we tell ourselves — in comfort, or delusion — do they too fade?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I both hate and need the faint echo.

Because a beating heart — however tormented —
Under the floorboards,
Beats a lifeless heart, above ground.