Le Cœur Lourd

Lyrics

The report is in.
The arteries are clear.
And yet.

The phone rang at 3:17 AM.
A voice, a name, a date.
The usual architecture of loss.
A sudden, overwhelming stressor.
The body receives the signal
and misunderstands the assignment.
It prepares for a physical fight
that will not arrive.
Only the cold front of absence.
Only the metallic taste of adrenaline with nowhere to go.

This is not a metaphor.
The muscle remembers what the mind is trying to forget.
The left ventricle, its apex stunned, balloons.
It takes the shape of a pot used to trap an octopus.
A narrow neck, a wide, useless base.
Hikaru Sato saw it first, in 1990.
He gave the grief a name:
Takotsubo.
The broken heart. Literally.

The crushing weight. The shortness of breath.
Every sign points to myocardial infarction.
We rush to the cath lab, expecting a blockage.
Expecting a simple plumbing problem.
But the dye flows freely.
The coronary vessels are pristine.
The patient insists, "But it hurts. Right here."
And we look at the echo, at the strange, swollen shape.
The map of a feeling, written in living tissue.

This is not a metaphor.
The muscle remembers what the mind is trying to forget.
The left ventricle, its apex stunned, balloons.
It takes the shape of a pot used to trap an octopus.
A narrow neck, a wide, useless base.
Hikaru Sato saw it first, in 1990.
He gave the grief a name:
Takotsubo.
The broken heart. Literally.

A condition that favors the post-menopausal woman.
As if the body, having finished one job, looks for another.
And the strangest part, the clinical footnote:
It can be triggered by joy.
A winning lottery ticket. A surprise reunion.
The heart, it seems, is not a discerning critic.
It cannot distinguish tragedy from comedy.
It only knows magnitude.
It only knows how to break.

The shape is temporary.
In weeks, the muscle will contract, return to form.
But the knowledge remains.
The body keeps the score.
The heart is a bad poet.
It takes everything so literally.