Beforeword: My heart skipped a beat, and it got me thinking about the mechanics of the heart. It is remarkably faithful—working with precision, independent of my conscious will. Beat after beat, day after day, it keeps perfect time. Yet this predictable rhythm can be altered in an instant by something as intangible as emotion. How can an organ so governed by biology be so deeply influenced by love? 

This is the Cardiology 🫀 of Love.

---

She lives in my chest,
slightly left of center,
an unpretentious tenant—

Day after day
she performs
without applause.

An organ,
a muscle,
roughly the size of my fist,
weighing a mere ten ounces.

One hundred thousand contractions,
nearly eight thousand litres
sent coursing through
sixty thousand miles
of vessels.

Never late.

Never distracted.

She knows only
systole—
to gather strength
and diastole—
to let go.

She trusts the quiet authority
of electrical impulses,
setting the pace,
each beating steady rhythms,
a lifetime of practiced certainty.

Then—

she met you.

Now the impulses
arrive offbeat,
lingering a bit longer.

She stumbles
into skipped beats,
bursts into wild accelerations,
then slows—
as though unwilling
to beat without your presence.

The cardiologist
might call it arrhythmia.

An ECG
would sketch unfamiliar peaks,
descents,
unexpected pauses.

But there’s no machine that could record
the way your smile widens every artery,
the way the warmth of your voice
improves circulation,
or how your touch caresses oxygen
into places—

Places—

I thought had long forgotten
how to breathe, to believe.

For years
she thought her purpose was simply to keep me alive.

You taught her
there is another reason
to beat.

Not just to sustain life—
but to race toward it.

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In creative solidarity, Dee