11.01.2015

two billion beats

I wondered how many rooms there were inside me that I'd yet to explore, how many doors still clicked closed, how many palindromes, how many people, how many worlds, and whether they would all be as beautiful as the stone in the sky we call earth: this planet holding oceans and fields and so many human hearts, each with two billion beats in a lifetime. That's what we get, two billion beats, not much more and sometimes much less. All humans, our hearts hammering on until one day they stop, and the body gets buried, and we go back to being atoms with their spinning centers, microscopic flecks of enormous energy and light, as though packed with all our lifetime love--its curves and caresses, its sudden surprises, its real revelations, its long-gone losses, its mourning melodies, its coconut-soup comfort--all of it happening in two billion beats of the human heart turning on our stone in the sky. 

-- Lauren Slater, "Her Over Him," Elle

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