A Thought, Virginia Woolf

"You never should have let me listen to your heart beating. In all the seriousness I can muster, I can remember the way it beats with perfect clarity. The rush when I put my ear against your chest like a shell and oh how I could hear the vastness of every ocean when I did. So beautiful. The pounding of a deep, chaotic drum thrum-thrumming against me. Though it entrances me, it disturbs me also. It vexes me because it beating that way reminds me that you are human even though you treat me as though you are not. It reminds me there is an innocence existing within you, collapsing and rising like a fallen star that even you cannot find the strength to name or acknowledge and what a tragedy you are--to have a bit of universe inside you and not know its name. To be a star and not know it. To be alone with your chaotic beating, never to be dancing.
But it's that innocence within you that makes me want to start everything over and pull the record back to where the song was soft and delicate and exciting; pull the record backwards to where the song of just your heart is beating and let the needle snag there forever. Always rising and falling, rising and falling. I'd be a happy woman, content with a shell against my ear and a pounding I can never be rid of. What a sensation that would be."
-k.p.