Between Heartbeat and Service
Wherein a distinction is lost...
Between Heartbeat and Service
Return
I look around. It's the inner wall of my heart - a heart dream again today, but I had heart dream yesterday! I decide to look around for a help desk.
The ground rises and falls, like an inverse trampoline that leaves me (instead of in a perpetual falling) in a perptual foating. I soon learn to put a foot down in the moments there is ground (in place of thrashing until the flesh returns to contact with me and I go sailing to whatever direction my thrash outputs). This is walking.
This passes for walking (here), rather. The help desk comes into view. At the center of the court (I don't know pieces of the heart - I'm just the recurring white hare of my living nightmare) is a booth. It's for tickets to the Beat, what passes for a performance hall here.
Booth
I tell them I am looking to talk to whatever keeps putting me in this dream. They ask my name, I give it, they turn around to a bunch of keys on the post and pull a lilac and lavender one down from somewhere in the top left.
I thank them and head out, or they tell me they don't know where it goes and more than I do. I walk around the inner walls of the heart, getting walking down so well, some footsteps it feels like my footfall sends the walls of the heart away. The air is always the freshest it will ever be here, and I feel bad for polluting it with my presence (before I remember I was pulled in to this mess and none of that is my life's concern).
I look at the key. It honestly feels like a solution looking for a problem. Isn't the point of a heart that doors open and shut as they need, not as I have need for them to, for a heart. I walk around some of the abysses with the winds that seem like they want to suck me through the world and bring me back. Perhaps I've gone into some of these before.
Portal
Before I remember this is my heart. I live here. I shouldn't be having this dream. I want to be watching emotional, resonant metaphor-laden kaiju films with lovers in a parking lot converted to a storage room by shoddily expanding out the facade and retrofitting the emergency outdoor stairwell to doorways leading into the room. I shouldn'thave to look ib to any matters of the heart. They're my matters. Wouldn't I know if I had to look into them?
I look at the key again. It looks like it goes to nothing. Like it can't possibly envage with any tumblers. Like it just messes with my grip as I try and hold onto it. Picking the lock of my grip on this situation is proving harder and harder to sit with. I keep dreaming up other worlds. But I know when I come back to what is actually happening. It's just this dream.
Me frollicking through the walls of my heart, looking for somewhere to see, something to do, someone to be. It's infuriating. I should be out there. I should be looking around. I should be birds, a whole murmur of sound, I should be animals no one's seen or've been found. Just now, like this, by you. Writing in your little book. Looking for a moment with something living (that's me!). Finding this creature. What do you see?
Sense
I could be any creature with a heart, so you can go to any planet with this. I have a key, so you can stick it anywhere and let what wants to happen. Might I suggest the center of the heart, a montage of attempts to time a jump perfectly with the heart to land me in the center, where my body is still learning to love one wall over the others.
Where falling toward is left in stasis. And falling in is toward wanted ground. Yes this is me asking you for help. This is every eacape game where the protagonist has given their heart away with everything in it including themself to someone else. This is every prey animal in the jaws shaped to fit them over the course of a story so vast it has evolved its own dream. Its own heart. Its own key and place to put it.
It's own way to look. Every animal (generatively forgetting to leave shape for the moment - becoming steller-jay, forgetting I am hare, twirling out of the jaws of the parts of me that wants this to end, every obligation. Each with its own way of catching me no matter my shape. Survival in service to constant transformation. Movement, every gasp of water. Atmosphere every lung fills. Opening. Reaching. With key.
And sense to turn.