A long time ago, at least by a child’s time, he starts turning. He blocks things out. He locks his heart. He decides to be happy and do what he wants. His heart slowly turns to stone.

The blood roars through, pushed by each beat, how can a stone heart beat? Not normally, that is for sure. His brain controls it, cold, logical, no emotion, except happiness, that is what he says. He says it over and over, I am happy all the time, until he thinks he believes it. And then he believes it and his heart is stone.

But the blood flows and the body feels and emotions come anyhow. He refuse them, all but happiness, and blood lays down a wall of emotion inside his heart. Chalcedony, lining the chambers, coating the valves, coating the arteries that feed the heart. The heart doesn’t need the arteries open because it is not beating. It is stone. His brain is beating. Beating the emotions away, away, away, refusing the body and the heart.

The heart is hollow. Slowly it is lined with clear agate. At last his heart is full: no more chamber. Agatized, all the way through. When he is cracked open, far in the future, a chalcedony nodule will show the perfect interior of a stone heart.

And where does the blood go now? we wonder. Laying down the lining of agate, clear, colored lines of emotions rejected, all the colors of the rainbow, what he thinks of as impurities. That is how he thinks of his emotions: impurities, to be rejected.

What will be agatized next? His liver? His lungs? He says strokes are the end for his family. He calls it then, his brain is agatized. The part that controls the pumping, overriding his heart over and over, when that part turns to agate, he will be correct. A stroke. How long will it take, we wonder? One year, five years, ten? He says he won’t go past 80. That will be 13 years. How apropos.

Can nothing stop this? Chalcedony is hard, not hard as diamonds, but very very hard. Agates are common and we search for the clear ones, the lit ones on the beach. Almost nothing can wear them down: high pressure would kill him, high heat would kill him, what is left? Water. Water wears down rock.

Enter the sea. The sea of love, the sea of dreams, the sea of the unconscious. Seek help, before you turn yourself to full stone. Agatized and dead.

Maybe there are other treatments, I don’t know.

A stone shaped heart is rare, I hope. See how it catches the light. Beautiful and sad.

August 30, 2022