Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

When Wren was in elementary school, the class attached paper wishes to the dream catchers they made with yarn and disposable plates. In thick marker, Wren wrote her dream: A Medium-Sized Life. Second-grade Wren’s reasoning was that a life too noticeable might be stolen, and conversely, a wispy existence might blow away or be stepped on. Medium was safe.

Wren disliked the ceiling of gray, the hungry, gaping mouth of seasonal depression that seemed to swallow her from October until April.

Lewis appreciated organization as a concept but never remembered to practice it.

Fielding officious, gendered questions was part of being a woman in the world, and the world did not care that she was an extremely private person.

“It is appropriate and, some might say, poetic to fail in one’s twenties, but I would be humiliated if I failed at the same thing in my thirties, especially when you are sacrificing, too.”

I’ve had it wrong all along. If magic exists in a real way, it is not here to dazzle us with all that is unreal to the naked eye. What if magic is just mislabeled peace? A peace that says suffering doesn’t have a purpose or reason. A peace that says meaning is the medicine. A peace that says I don’t need to know how or why.

Wren and the Tiny Pregnant Woman shared practical, applied interests like oncoming personal devastation, terrifying sadness, and the experience of free-falling into grief and the unknown.

All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.

Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.

What if the solution to life, which seemed so often like an ongoing series of hardships, was to abandon it?

the theater hums with presence as everyone in the audience and cast alike remembers that joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive is everything in between.

Are we all just actors, performing some unbound art form for God, the audience of space? I wish I could have seen then what I know now. All along, I had the starring role.

What do I need? What do I need? What do I need? What do I need? What do I need? Wren asked into the night, just as her mother taught her when she was a small girl. Finally, an answer appeared: Everything, everything, everything, everything, I need everything, and could it be that everything is too much for one woman to seek and grasp, alone?

“In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead, and then nothing will matter.” “What?” “That’s something my husband said once. It gives you this immediate perspective. Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls, and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born, lying to each other, agreeing to make invented ideas important, to numb ourselves from the secret.” “What’s the secret?” “Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.”

Wren could not easily walk away now, because she had lingered past the point of invisibility. Her identity was crystallized to these people, and once she allowed herself to become solid to other human beings, she would be seen. After being seen, Wren risked being known, and being known came with the risk of loss. Even this small interaction cost her too much.

Life is hard, she thought, and instantly reconsidered. No. It is vicious.

Suddenly, with such insatiable yearning, Wren wanted to fill her lungs. She did not choose to be born, but she chose, in this moment, to live.

Nothing bad lasts forever. Neither does anything good.

Rick could handle the sight of an open wound, work for twenty hours with no sleep, and tell a patient they were dying, but he did not have the courage to hold his own wife, tell her she needed help, or say he would love her until the day he died. Yes, he was a man of his era, one in a generation of boys who were trained to lead but never feel, one in a generation of boys who became staunch, withholding men in lonely rooms, looking out at life with no way to touch it.

Time was a heavy stone turning inside her.

Marcos drew an outline of a person who was generous, wise, and kind, and Angela’s longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real. Yet the heartbreak was not for nothing. Angela would be left with a gift, a life, her daughter.

So, the atmospheric shimmering of greatest happiness, two girls greeting life hand in hand, was theirs to borrow, not keep.

“What do I do if I miss you?” “When I die?” “No, when you change. You just said not dying.” … “Well, when you miss me, you’ll go somewhere big and open, a place like our lake or any place where you can see the whole sky. Once you’re there, take a big, deep breath, and start to notice all the things we notice when we’re together.” “Like birds?” “Yes, notice the cardinals, the scissor-tailed flycatchers…”

“And the hummingbirds, robins, and red-bellied woodpeckers?” “Yes, and the clouds, moon, and stars. And the sounds of things, like the breeze in the tall grass, the wind in the trees, the whir of cars passing on the interstate, people talking, yelling, laughing. Smell the campfire smoke, summer rain, wet leaves. But most of all, I want you to notice what’s inside you. Ask yourself, What do I need?”

In the rare hopeful hour, I tell myself this darkness has a purpose: to help me recognize light if I ever find it again.

Lewis discovered a layer of sadness even deeper than his previous depression: a bleak, gorgeous fog so quiet and still it resembled peace.

Lewis realized he did not fear death but grief, the ache of being alone and mangled by change.

LEWIS: I’ve been thinking lately, maybe we do get new performances of the same day, opportunities to be more accepting and loving. Maybe practice, rehearsal, is also the way to freedom. We can start over. Time can loop back on itself, and here I am again with you, Margaret, trying.

Gradually, Lewis began to accept that this was the life he wanted to be living, simply because it was the only life he had.

Joy is a little girl who has no qualms about taking the space she needs with her voice, physicality, and huge emotions. Wren realizes she has much to learn from her.

At home, Joy inspires an alchemic shift in Wren’s perspective. Wren no longer sees life as a long, linear ladder with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.

When Wren returns to the living room to arrange the presents, she’s shaken by the energy of love radiating out of and beyond her body. This love expands until it fills the entire room, house, neighborhood, city, nation, planet, and the universe, beyond. Afterward, Wren realizes she herself is the mountain she’s been climbing all along.

The world is a big and small place, and life, a terrifying and sublime journey.

The small hand wants to pull away from her mother’s safe hold. The small, dear hand needs to swim, explore, love. The ocean cannot be contained; neither can love; neither can Joy. Wren loosens her grasp. It is so hard to let go. “Go, play, be free,” Wren says, heart hammering like rain on a metal roof.