heartbreak

Some years ago, a biologist discovered a viable means of separating hearts from their bodies. In a process coined ventri-discidium – ventri, referring to the ventricles of the heart, and discidium, meaning separation – he was able, without impairment to any human biological function, to remove a heart so it could be safeguarded outside the body.

That was years ago, and today nearly everyone has dissociated their primary oxygenating organ as a means of protecting it from damage. Around this discovery arose a number of ancillary business ventures associated with the storing and transporting of human hearts. And unsurprisingly out of this discovery came various other businesses, a whole market around this new commodity of a person’s most fundamental organ. 

First and foremost, there were new highly specialized home safes to store people’s hearts. Tailor-made for containing organs and protecting them in the case of natural disasters, they were fireproof, water proof, and damage proof. They could withstand category-five hurricanes, earthquakes, and forest fires. The protection of hearts became big business only a few years after the discovery of ventri-discidium, and unsurprisingly government regulation was slow to catch up to the businessmen who forged these new ventures.

Fortunately, the government, through various appellate courts, maintained the right of every human to decide what to do with his or her own body parts, including the heart. When half of the population affected by a government regulation are men, it was no surprise that the law fell on the side of proprietary rights and not on high moral authority of governing bodies. Less could be said for a law affecting only women.

Besides in-home safes made from steel, a number of facilities opened to outsource the storage of hearts. Large, secure vaults were constructed to store hearts. These safety boxes could easily be accessed and hearts retrieved at a moment’s notice. One could simply pay a nominal monthly fee, and the storage facility would ensure that one’s heart was safely guarded by around-the-clock security teams and walls of concrete and steel. This service offered people a sense of security that their hearts were being safely looked after. These customers could then focus their energy on other pastimes like boating and knitting.

But with any market, of course, there came several underground dealings. The theft of hearts was, while a small percentage of overall larceny, a fear among many people. Without a heart, one could not function. In the possession of another, a heart was guided to things to which its owner may or may not have complied. Losing one’s heart to a stranger or someone with ill intentions was a sizable threat to one’s own security. An outsized, albeit unlikely, risk.

Beyond the stealing of hearts, there were those who believed in making a profit from the exploitation of their own hearts. These so-called love lenders would rent their hearts out to strangers for a few hours or even days at a time. The business of love lending had been outlawed nearly immediately, but several organizations petitioned to allow for the free market of lending one’s heart to another. Unlike sex work, both men and women borrowed hearts in equal numbers, and the business of love lending was rarely associated with acts of violence or other illicit dealings. It was argued that it should be protected as any legitimate profession. 

Some also lent their hearts as a charitable act with no assumptions of monetary compensation. When a friend was down, a person could lend that friend their heart in an effort to nurse them back to emotional health. People would lend hearts to children sick in hospitals or to the elderly or to those who had recently lost a loved one.

There were some who, because of aligned financial interests, gave their hearts to those would provide them a better life: oversized houses, expensive cars, vacations on Greek islands. These kept men and women discarded their hearts as meer falsities. The sensations they felt were nothing in comparison to the lives they could lead because of them. They were pragmatists, as they argued. They cared little about the invented emotions that were so often told as lies in storybooks. Some called them cheap or shallow. Others called them reasonable people in an otherwise insane world. One could give away their morals to work in finance – why not give away one’s heart to another in exchange for a secure life.

Of course, there were those who sold their hearts outright. These were people who had long ago lost all use for them. They believed perhaps their hearts to be unnecessary or perhaps better in the hands of another, or maybe it was that their hearts were long ago irreparably broken. Either way, their hearts no longer served them in a capacity they saw fit to care for them, so they simply sold them off to the highest bidder.

Like all things in America, hearts became a commodity one could buy and sell. And in giving it a monetary value, they had in effect erased all of its intrinsic, untouchable value. Hearts were no longer tethered to one’s body, inseparable from it. Hearts could be traded and sent FedEx next-day air. They could be held in dark boxes awaiting a day for their future use or taken away if one could no longer afford their care.

What many didn’t realize was that the sale of hearts was not the same as the sale of rice or corn or copper. Hearts were not fungible, and as it turned out, the means by which a heart was acquired largely impacted its future functionality.

While one could steal a barrel of corn and use it as stock as if he had bought it, one could not simply steal a heart. The heart, as an organ of things unseen and scientifically unprovable, felt the way it was taken. A heart given reacted differently from a heart stolen. A heart hidden away aged differently from a heart left out in the open. Hearts like all living things felt intention.

Those who paid for hearts found that they never quite lived up to the expectations. Those who stole them found them beating more slowly and in the end nearly useless. Those who turned their hearts into ATMs soon found them withered and sullen. 

Soon enough there came a movement against ventri-discidium, coined the Chest Movement, to maintain one’s heart in the only secure place a human had – inside the body. Of course, keeping one’s heart in one’s body left it susceptible to the whims of the world, to getting bruised and broken, to aching and stress, and even to potential destruction. The human body, while a wonderful vessel for many things, was not a great protector of the heart. With its fleshy and brittle composition, there were a number of simple ways it could be destroyed – a car accident, a fall, a stray bullet.

Yet the risks involved in keeping one’s heart within its originating receptacle were by all means worth it to many, because when one separated a heart from its body, the body ached for its return. The benefits that came with ventri-dicidium, while numerous, ultimately failed to recognize the primary function of a heart: to be tied to its maker, to pump blood through its veins, and to be carried around with it wherever it went. And so many returned their hearts back to their bodies where they were intended to be. And though many kept their hearts secured, they seemed to walk around with heavier feet, looking down, struggling to breath. They had tried to protect their hearts, but they had turned them from living flesh and blood into meat.

Those who kept their hearts in their chests risked everything to keep their hearts safely secured with them at all times, because they understand a fundamental truth of human existence: to risk loss of one’s heart was, after all, to live.