Heart of a Girl, Prologue

There is a sound.

It is beneath the hum of tires cruising across pavement on the distant highway. Beneath the patter of raindrops on asphalt, trees, grass, sidewalk. It is softer than the crush of sneaker soles articulating across the asphalt on this empty street, softer even than the breathing, slightly labored, that only my ears hear this night. Beneath the breath is a beating rhythm. It seems strange to say my heartbeat is a sound. Well, of course it’s a sound. I know the sound of a heartbeat through a stethoscope, the amplified fluttering sounds of a tiny heartbeat through an ultrasound, the sound of it pounding in my ears when I lie in bed, my ear against the pillow, the drumming seeming to keep me awake though just a moment before it wasn’t there and now I can’t unhear it. The sense of blood pumping through my ears. But this night, this pre-dawn morning, as I walk and walk to an unknown destination, I’m sure I hear my heartbeat. As if the contractions and nerve pulses of my heart are emanating from my body in such waves that the air vibrates and creates sound. I begin to walk to that beat, or the beat shifts to match my pace, as the breath of a baby lying with his mother matches the rhythm of her breathing. Either way, the walk and the beat are the same and one seems to keep the other going. Each seems to need the company on this damp and lonely street.

I don’t think I’ve walked on this street before, but the houses feel familiar. The shallow angle of the roofs with their widely curved peaks topped by molded shingles. The style of the front porches with plenty of space for a swing or a pair of chairs and wide wooden columns. The tight spacing between one house and the next, the yards with a small patch of grass in the front and long narrow yards behind. The fading rose bushes and bright mums in clusters here and there. The houses glimmer to my eyes with the lighting of childhood memory, misty and layered with emotion more than visual detail. I picture a house from my childhood. I was young enough when we lived there that I only have snapshot memories, memories that I can’t distinguish from photographs I’ve studied since. A can picture a corner of a kitchen with a small table and two built-in benches where I helped my mother decorate a birthday cake with a layer of soft pastel candies adhered with frosting. I can picture the five kitchen doors that must be too numerous for that single early 20th century basic residential kitchen…it must be a trick of memory: one closet door with a broom and dust pan, a hook with an apron; one that revealed worn open-backed basement steps that I wouldn’t walk down alone; one door to the living room; one to the dining room; lastly the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard where I would smell every flower, placing my whole nose into each blossom and once got stung by a bee just under my eye. Afterward I sat inside on the couch crying while my mother dabbed baking soda paste on the sting to cool it. The rag rug in front of the stove that made the floor a slip-n-slide when Dad would come home and give us turns sliding across the floor, gripping each others hands. Snapshots, passing scenery. These seemed to be the extent of my memory of that time. A time that flits occasionally through this present time like a firefly, when like a child my focus is so much in this moment, on the task at hand, on these steps my feet are taking, on the image of the door that I know I need to walk through, and have needed to walk through for so long, that all my memories of past things I’ve done and people I’ve known feel distant and dreamlike, like those childhood memories. I understand memories now for the ephemera that they are. I see the tenuousness of their relationship to this moment. Even as these past moments in very real ways brought me here, they have now passed away and I stand in this moment alone. And free.

These houses I pass, none are the place I’m looking for and so my eyes pass over them and my thoughts come and go and I keep walking. I think about the house I left earlier tonight, about Neal who helped me. He even gave me this cap I’m wearing, “To keep the rain off your head”, he said. That was after the fire started, after he gave me a place to sleep and an afghan with zig-zags like my grandma used to crochet, after he sat me down with a bowl of soup and a nice slice of buttered bread, after his big brown and white long-haired sheepdog Tandy followed me to the table and rested her head on my lap, after he called to me from his yard where he was clearing fallen branches from the enormous sycamore tree that grew there. For a moment I wonder how he is, though I have a strong sense that he is fine. As for myself I wasn’t hurt, although it felt like a narrow escape from that fire. The forces guiding me here are not forceful but they are strong and they are relentless. If I ignore them or look the other way their energy continues to build up. It’s not a dark or foreboding energy but it is almost mechanical. It operates with its own logic. A series of if-then statements. So I keep walking, my heart guiding each step. For losing sight of this moment and my heart’s guidance could bring catastrophe.

This is the first installment of a work in progress. Maybe a story or maybe a novel. The story has been in me for a long time and I think it’s now ready to be told.