My Heart

I’ve been married three times, each time to a designer, renovating my heart. I’m still standing, though not as often.

My heart is irregular and incompetent, still it keeps beating all the time. Arrhythmia is what it’s called, that flutter, that irregularity. My friend said “just imagine, you’re a lucky man, you have a butterfly heart.” I’m sure his job doesn’t let him use enough metaphors, and I enjoy the thought, lightening up.

Oh so much better to have a butterfly fluttering in my chest. My butterfly heart is not like a wheel that is broken, or a ship sinking in mid ocean. I could kiss her nose. Oh, Linda, I wish you could sing again!

My heart’s incompetence is the incompetence of my aortic valve. In lingual terms the smaller standing for something larger. My heart has an old washing machine swish swash sound. I swish, I swash, my heart pumping like mad. The swash detected by stethoscope by my general practitioner later confirmed with an ultrasound. Reflux is all that it is. Neither flutter or back swash of my blood will kill me.