but my heart still didn’t hurt. I wanted it to, though. I wanted an answer, something I could treat and research and know about and fight against. The doctors concluded—after those tests and my family medical history and my straw allergy and immunity to penicillin failed to provide an answer—that my heart was physically healthy. They concluded the pain must be caused by stress and told me to take up yoga practice, to breathe my way towards the center. That wasn’t the answer that I wanted, and as it happened, I felt more pain, a deeper squeeze, a sense of urgency. I continued wondering why the pain began when it did. Why not earlier? Why begin at all? It had occurred to me that I didn’t know my own body. I knew what was supposed to reside beneath my skin, but did it? I wanted to see it, to peel away the skin and slough through the fat and paw beneath muscle fiber and striation to get at the core, the center of things. 5. In the autumn of 2010, three of the Iowa Supreme Court Justices who voted for same-sex equality were subsequently voted off the bench. Members of the American Family Association and the National Organization for Marriage, who supported the “reshaping” of the Iowa Supreme Court, explained that
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those former judges “had sided in freedom over virtue.” The emotional and pseudo-moral beliefs of these special interests groups collided with state constitutional law, butted against all of those who tried to tip the social balance, to push it inside out. 6. What lies at the center? I crave the interior, to know the things that cannot be seen. Sometimes, when I forget to eat or don’t have time to sleep or my sister drives drunk, or I read the New York Times, or my brother’s eyes look like he’s been using heroin again, my heart hurts. It takes my breath away. I try to breathe, but the sharpness of the pain prevents me. I exhale, slowly and squeeze my right fist, tight. I don’t need to listen to the grating roar because I can feel it and the pebbles and the tide nudging, too. The waters that push against Dover Beach are familiar and I can do nothing but wait and try to breathe. I imagine my sister bleeding from her head, her neck limp, the wheels of her Taurus straddling an oak tree. I imagine my brother laying on a wooden floor, the crook of his left arm bent at a gentle angle, stiff. I imagine these things because I want to know, to figure out why. I want to know how and what and why my brother, sister, and those propelled by religious fervor think.