Vickie Kim
Sometimes, I hear a heartbeat underneath the floorboards.
By no means have I dismembered and buried a dead man. Yet, my mind ticks to the silent beat of a heart, and my body unknowingly follows, too curious to ignore the beating. No, in this story, the steady heartbeat is not the heartbeat of a dead old man.
The steady heartbeat is the little clock sitting upright on my desk, hand-crafted to mimic the colorful charm of iconic Gaudi mosaics. A little lizard slinks along the colorful chunks of painted clay, its vibrant hues of green and red gleaming under the light of my cheap LED lamp. The clock hands stutter with poor accuracy and have long fallen behind the true tempo of time, as if slowing down time itself while I restlessly work alongside it. Drawing for amusement until my knuckles are strained and sore, studying for perfection until my brain is melted and dazed, writing for fun until my eyes are blurry and cross-eyed, the clock embodies my perception of time: broken and nonexistent, for time does not exist in the heat of passion.
Even through the passion, the soft, calculated ticks of the clock never cease.
The steady heartbeat is the old metronome sitting on a bookshelf, next to my beloved grand piano. It has watched over me for eleven years, from when I played my first note on a cheap stand-up piano to when I iced my sore arms after running through Beethoven’s merciless Piano Sonata No.11, Op. 22 one too many times on a mellifluous grand piano. Under its watch, I attempted to play the violin, the oboe, and the flute, while my brother joined in as a second pianist; too soon, the metronome became an antique, and after constant torment of my brother’s hand childishly swinging the weight back and forth, the beat it echoes no longer evenly flows; it vaguely resembles the precise cadence of the electrical metronome I use now. Still, it is the one that has overseen a decade of music that proudly sits on its throne above the piano.
Even when not in use, the beautiful, mellow ticks of the metronome never cease.
The steady heartbeat is the stumbling rhythm of language on my tongue, whether it’s home-spoken Korean, school-taught Chinese and Spanish, or English. While I can’t reciprocate speech, my auditory comprehension is like an invaluable gift. Instead of rapid-fire, indecipherable gibberish, syllables merge to form words that have been etched into my memory. Sometimes, I may respond with a short, fluid answer, a “nae!”, “hao-de!”, or “¡sí!”; other times, I may respond hesitantly, nervous despite my diligent practice with bilingual friends. Yet, seventeen years of English, fifteen years of Korean, four years of Spanish, and two-and-a-half years of Chinese later, and instead of burnt-out annoyance, excitement rushes forth with each successful foreign language.
Even if not fluent, the messy flow of foreign language never ceases.
The steady heartbeat fills me with life, pushing me through the thorns that attempt that to hinder me.
It kept me alive when I was an alien spectacle for a white-dominant grade school, when I was a robot caged in anxiety, when I was a cloud of dark depression masked with the outward illusion of weightlessness, when I was a leaf blown in all directions under the overwhelming gust of a pandemic.
The heartbeat is not a guilty, dead man’s heartbeat; it is a never-ending heartbeat full of vivacious passion, and it belongs to me.