Meditation on a Heart with Wings
Eighteen months after my latest cardiac procedure, my heart forgets to beat, and then remembers again. I try to ignore the disordered beats, focusing instead on ordering strips of colored paper on which I have written a series of puns and riddles for my daughter’s twenty-third birthday. She’s just graduated from college, and her goal is to find first a job and then an apartment of her own. This will be her last birthday celebration living with us at home, and I want to make it special. Each strip of paper is matched to a small gift. I sequence them in a way that I hope will bring her the greatest delight as she attempts to decode the gift based on the paper.
I mean for her to open a pair of ladybug earrings last. I tape the last strip of paper to the wrapped box: “What kind of insect can’t go in the men’s room?” and “What kind of bugs have difficulty playing hide and seek—and why?”
The ladybug has become our long-standing symbol of comfort when I’m no longer near. It began when she was a toddler, when I left her every morning at daycare. If I turned around on my walk back to the car, I saw her standing at the large picture window, palms to the glass, tears streaming down her face. To combat her distress, I purchased several sheets of heart-shaped ladybug stickers and kept them in the car. Each morning, I peeled off one sticker and placed it on the back of her hand. Then I pressed my index finger onto the ladybug with its little red heart wings.
“I’m putting alllllll my love in there,” I said. “Can you feel it?”
“I can feel it, Mommy,” she replied reverently, staring at the sticker and then smiling up at me.
“If you miss me during the day, just touch the ladybug sticker and you’ll feel the love, okay?”
A week before her fifteenth birthday, we attended a festival together in Kansas. We were greeted at the registration tent not by ladybugs, but by butterflies. Dozens of them landed on our arms, legs, ears, their flapping wings decorating our chests. We held hands, live butterflies replacing the ladybug stickers, an omen of metamorphosis. That was the year I would become engaged, get married—the year that would end my tenure as a single mother. Even as my daughter and I flitted around the campsite adorned with actual butterflies, my future husband was making a trip to my parents’ farm to declare his intentions. It was the same year I would have a stroke, caused by a hole between the upper wings of my heart, a flapping in the septum between atria, a congenital worm in the apple, secretly chewing away at it since my birth.
It was a big year.
The summer she graduated from high school, she and I attended another festival together, this one in Ohio. I brought with me the handwritten journal I’d kept when I was pregnant with her. I read her excerpts each evening after we finished our camp stove dinners. Some were painful. Stories from the months we lived with my grandmother, whose sharp tongue loudly proclaimed to the ladies who sat for her kitchen-salon perms and coloring what a mistake I was making as an unwed mother. The story of my daughter’s biological father’s alcoholism and the accident that broke both his legs when he walked drunk into traffic. His complete abandonment of us through the remainder of our pregnancy. My decision to ask him to relinquish his paternal rights. I—whose own adoptive history had been redacted, withheld, erased—had vowed in that journal that I would not keep from her the stories of her origins. But perhaps she had not been ready to hear all that. Later that night she had a panic attack, paranoid about bugs in her tent.
We arrived home to parsley worm on our carrots, parsley, and dill. I saved one of the caterpillars, put it in a bug box on our back porch and watched it unzip its skin to reveal the chrysalis beneath. The days shortened almost invisibly as it dissolved into soup, its cells changing from larvae to black swallowtail butterfly. I checked our insect box daily, hoping to be present for the first peristaltic spasms rippling across the chrysalis, the first split near the cremaster, legs emerging, the wet crumpled wings leaving behind an empty shell. July slipped into August, and our daughter slipped from our home to a college dorm in Hawai’i. The butterfly never emerged. It takes money to fly if you don’t got wings, she had proclaimed at age two. Turns out, it takes protein molecules, too: actin and myocin, two chemicals that allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. If one is missing, the wings will grow, but the butterfly cannot flap, and therefore, cannot fly. These same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart. If one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, leading to heart failure.
Tonight, heart fluttering, I add a ladybug sticker to each strip of paper. A single sheet of stickers remains from the pack I bought two decades ago. Memories of ladybugs and butterflies become a sort of meditation, a kind of saṁsāra particular to motherhood—an ocean of death and rebirth whose tides take the form of mothers and daughters leaving, and arriving, and leaving again. Soon I will be the one standing at a bay window, looking out at her driving away, tears in my eyes. Some days I am terrified that I will slip away too soon. I pull one of the stickers out, press it to the back of my hand. Grant me actin, myocin, I pray. Grant me all the love I can feel. Grant me a heart with wings.
Cover photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
About the Author
A graduate of Miami University’s MFA program, K Anand Gall (she/her; they/them) also holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. A former Editor-in-Chief for OxMag, K’s work has appeared recently in Glassworks, voidspace, Thin Air Magazine, The Journal, and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. She is the 2023 Academy of American Poets Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Poetry Prize winner. When she is not writing, she facilitates guided nature hikes for chickens. It’s a thing. Find her on X and Instagram @kanandgall or at kanandgall.com.
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