with everything i have

sometimes i put two fingers where my neck and chin meet to feel my pulse. it's comforting somehow to feel my heart beat, because that's all it's ever done. and it will continue to until God makes it stop.

my heart has pumped my blood through my body ever since i began to exist, no matter what was happening outside of my body. it's beat fast the times i've been scared out my mind, nervous and excited to the point of hysteria, and it's beat in slow motion it seems, when the foundations of my life were ripped out from under me, and it's even skipped beats. many times it's skipped beats...

it's swelled with love and other tender feelings almost to the point where i thought it'd burst if one more ounce of happy was sprinkled in. it's been stretched. many times i've doubted it could get any bigger, but then somehow it did. that's one thing i'll never fully understand, but fully love. 

i've lived through many situations where everything was so confusing, terrifying, terribly exciting, unsure, treacherous, devastating, utterly joyous and just so completely overwhelming and hard to understand that the only thing i was sure of - even more sure of than having breath, because sometimes i didn't even have that - was that my heart was beating. crazy fast, uncomfortably slow, excitingly uneven, noticeably and embarrassingly hard, or almost not at all - however it did it, it did it. and it's doing it right now. and though that's sometimes the only thing i'm sure of, it's enough.

written july 16, 2012