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Naming the Heartbeats
I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.