prompt: drum, title: corrective fluid in misc. flash fiction

The heart is a palimpsest. That’s a sentence as difficult to explain as it is to spell or pronounce.

Explaining what a palimpsest is, that’s actually the easy part. It’s the original recycling solution for the written word. A palimpsest is when a document’s physical medium has been re-used but the original writing shows through nonetheless. Good parchment and vellum didn’t come cheap back in the old days. When the words on a page were no longer considered needed, they would often be scraped off or painted over and the newly-blank slate would be repurposed for the next application. Like an old VHS home-recording that’s been dubbed and re-dubbed so many times that “Drums Along the Mohawk” is occasionally guest-starring A.L.F. or the cast of the Crystal Light aerobics instructional videos. Like the Wite-Out on a check where you’ve hastily covered over the fact you haven’t properly remembered what year it is since the first COVID lockdown.

Many would be astonished to know how much of our history is hidden beneath layers of proper mundane lists and tallies of every-day business in antiquity. A handful of pieces by the ancient mathematician Archimedes exist today only because someone scraped the church bulletins off that got slapped on top in Twelve-Twenty-Nine Common Era Jerusalem, some fifteen-hundred years later. History’s only as good as whatever the people in the past thought was worth saving. It was just old Greek pagan math, they probably thought they were saving the pages from Hell.

The heart is a palimpsest. Written on and written over, scraped and painted up pretty and fresh and white as snow, only to be written on once again. Still, no matter how sharp your blades or how true the bottle of Tipp-Ex, the old stories keep fighting their ways back to the surface. A flaking of paint or the scent of old perfume, the right angle of sunlight through a window and those feelings come back to you. Maybe garbled, maybe in-complete, possibly mixing with a different story altogether, but bits of the heart’s past always shine through, as long as it beats.

The harder part of that statement to explain, however, is just to tell you that whenever some writer starts talking about “the heart” as if they’re speaking of all hearts, they’re never really writing about anyone’s heart other than their own. Speaking in the general, in that collective sense, is a wonderful dodge to paper over your own vulnerabilities or insecurities but always know that a writer’s lying whenever they do that about the heart. Whenever we do that about hearts. They’re writing about their hearts. We’re writing about our hearts. I write of my heart.

My heart is a palimpsest. The longer I’ve lived, the more loves I’ve had to try to scrape off or blanket-over in hopes of starting again, but hold me up to a flashlight and all these adorations glow through, despite all my defensive posturings. My heart is a palimpsest. And so is yours.