There Is No Metaphor Here

The first time I heard your heartbeat, you were a green grape. You’d already been a poppy seed, a lentil, a blueberry, a kidney bean. The technician pressed a monitor to my abdomen in late January and the sound of running horses filled the room. That’s what I heard first: galloping, the hooves of so many wild horses and not your tiny grape heart. You were equine because I couldn’t describe the strange wonder of hearing you alive within me for the first time. Our baby app said you were the size of a single grape.

In the classroom, I tell my students that metaphors and similes are mathematics. That metaphors are equations occupied on both sides by nouns or images. That similes are asymptotes approaching grid lines they never touch. That figurative language makes abstractions concrete, that all fifteen of us can say I am sad and mean fifteen different things. It is implicit in the lesson that speaking so plainly lacks artfulness. Instead, one student’s sadness might be an empty rocking chair. Another’s might be a deserted highway. I do not tell them that my sadness was a strawberry river and that there was no art at all in crossing through it.

Five months before we heard your heart, before you even made it to a monitor, a different technician, my brain told me, as if observing someone else driving a different car.