In the black-and-white fluorescence of the X-ray, the heart is caught in the act of breaking. They call it Takotsubo—a pot that traps an octopus—named for the heart’s sudden change, swelling, and distorting like the vessel meant to capture the creature. All arms panicking, splaying and gasping against the walls, trying to return to the sea. The left ventricle distorts into this pot, swelling with grief—an ache that finds its shape through pain.
The doctors name it a myopathy, but I know better. You know how it feels when the heart sinks and twists on unsaid words, on a face that never arrives. A goodbye echoes through blood chambers, ricocheting off walls softened by longing. You don’t have to give this feeling a name to know it hurts.
It’s like a heart attack, they say. The pounding, the tight, sinking feeling under your ribs. But it’s different. No clogged artery, no vessel to stent. Just a sudden feeling. A deep plunge, the body’s betrayal of itself—the way you were betrayed, the way I was betrayed. A ghost wound, the kind that surfaces at night as you’re falling asleep as if the floor drops from under you. Gravity turns hostile; you’re falling. Just like that day, just like she claimed to fall. Your heart spasms in its cage, swelling like an ocean that cannot stop itself.
I feel the octopus squirming inside. Arms thrashing to break free, but its body still takes the shape of the pot. Like that feeling—I dare not speak its name—which molds to the spaces you give it and hardens there. The heart changes its shape under stress; it warps and reshapes to survive, and there you are, in the quiet corner of the ward, clutching your chest, trying to hold together all the places you know are breaking. No one ever tells you that a broken heart is not a metaphor. No one ever says it’s a thing with muscles, nerves, and memories.
The doctor tries to explain the heart’s forgiveness. How it bends, then aches in silence as it mends, how most hearts return to their original shapes. But who measures what is lost? Who accounts for the bruised parts that can never be whole again? I feel the beat, shallow but insistent. And I hope I’ll learn to live like this, with the faint echo of a captured octopus inside my chest, expanding and deflating with each breath—each painful, beautiful breath.
–Mosinmiloluwa
