Heart Songs

Amid the noises of the city and the chorus of disembodied voices drifting to my yard, one conversation between a father and daughter stands out. The daughter is leaving for the gym. Her father tells her to be careful. I-love-yous are exchanged—eight, perhaps, in the course of their brief interaction.

As I sit here eavesdropping, I see much more than I hear. I imagine, for example, this neighbor's late wife has been resurrected in his grown daughter's face, that I love you is a declaration that spans across time. I am considering many things—how we can think of love itself as a talisman against the worst of fates, even though our rational minds know better. This neighbor knows better. His knowledge is evident in every utterance of affection: my love may not protect you, but it may comfort you. It comforts me.

Are you driving? I love you. Be careful. I love you. I have loved you all the days I have not been able to tell you, all the days that may never come.

Can we ever say it enough? Do we sustain each other with our love, letting it fall like honey from our lips?

***

When learning a language, after memorizing the conjugations of to be and to have, we turn our attention to the verb to love.

Catholic-school children still dutifully outline love’s Latin forms—amo, amas, amat—while the nuns give thanks that they do not have to explain the Eros of Greek. But God's love is alive in this dead language, ringing out in the Orthodox apses, so the drills continue:

Amamus, amatis, amant. . .

 A French speaking couple I know calls each other mon amour—my love. Nothing else. Nothing of the excessively sweet pet names used in English, no honey or sugar or sweetie, words that depict love as an object of consumption. This couple is not consumed by the other's love; they are the other's love. 

In Spanish, lovers may also call each other my love—mi amor—but they also may call each other mi corazón—my heart—or mi vida—my life. Consider the subtleties between English and Spanish:

I love you with my heart.
You are my heart.
I love you for my life.
You are my life.

My love, my heart, my life—no grammar lesson will ever teach me how to translate you. You are a mood, a subtle shift in tone. Both foreign language and native tongue. I will spend a lifetime in study—learning and forgetting, grasping for words. But you are my heart, the steady rhythm of my life, fluent in a language I cannot speak but understand.

***

The ancients once believed the heart was an organ of consciousness and the source of all emotion. Even our language contains the vestiges of this thought:

Oh my heart, we may say when particularly moved, our hands drawn up to our chest as if to cradle this fragile thing inside, this thing so filled with feeling it bursts open every second so that the body may experience what the heart alone cannot contain.

And how could it contain it all? If a heart has a memory, it is the repository for the entire human story, all love and grief and bliss and pain. That steady thump-and-rush forms the rhythm of all our lives. I know your heart songs and you know mine. It is ancient music, every beat a revelation—a breathless, urgent, joyful prayer.