Jarrod Sage

 

I saw a pulsing overhead. Surprisingly cloudless in mid-May—rare for that Pacific Northwest town at the roof of the West Coast to stave off rain for even one spring day—I was half-naked, splayed across linen in a bed flanking the window with blinds raised such that my line of sight lay aligned with the slits, eyes colinear so thin slivers of tree leaves and blue sky could try to seep in. Light passed the slats, it spilled across my chest in bands and beams, I poked at my phone screen just to find something more to do with my hands. Bored, I set my phone across my left pectoral and the screen reflected crumpled furls from those softly scoring tresses northward, like a message. Thin lines of light wrapped around each other, cast from fractured glass in weird ways, at obscure angles, until all of it was above me pooled into some smeared tangle. I shifted my body slightly and the warping reflection shuddered violently; even when static, every passive tremor in my musculature—innocuous, silently—imparted some slight stochastic flutter, each unconscious flex of myosin and actin shuttled high and amplified by some trigonometric nonsense regarding angles and reflected light, arithmetic and how all of that relates to distance. Amid the gently stirring noise, I noticed a signal, soft but persistent. A subtle pulse, periodic, repeating: the light dashes to the right, pulls to the left, and returns quickly—seamlessly—to the place it was meant to be before pausing, waiting, and doing the entire dance again. I stayed still, but the signal remained; as spilling blood in my veins cohered, resonated, distilled to the ceiling, I realized that sheared light was the gated chambers of my heart beating. I had long since forgotten the flow of blood through the heart—a hard, rushed tour through ventricles and atria, various valves and aortic plumbing playing Connect Four in probably whatever order I was told to pass high school biology: something something pulmonary, the tricuspid valve shuttering. I felt the walls inside engorge and compress, but as hard as I tried I couldn’t recall where the blood went: through the right half of my heart first, or through the left? I saw my body as a spectrophotometer, an unruly instrument, intimate, ultimately meant to capture and organize light: puddles of streetlamps, TV static, the glow of Saturn; geometric shapes, spurious patterns, hidden meaning; infrared heat-seeking, the color of my iris, the blush in her skin; a cosmological background of microwave radiation, starlight stretched in a bloating universe, sunshine refracting through my own aorta. A jut to the right before the left suggests some amount of compression on the side next to my sternum—the stria falling through the window blinds tell me my blood goes first through my right atrium. We learn almost everything from light. The light outside curled behind evergreen trees—you could feel the warmth leave—and the striations across my skin dimmed. The recitation of the sun as my pulsing blood faded from the ceiling, tangled threads content not to fully unwind from sight but instead okay with simply disappearing. I laid a moment longer in my poorly lit bedroom, wishing to move but consumed with lustrous gratitude for the gleaming thing that every day gives me infinitely many ways of seeing.