Helen Mort

My weight is four whippets, two Chinese gymnasts, half a shot-putter. It can be measured in bags of sugar, jam jars, enough feathers for sixty pillows, or a flock of dead birds but some days it’s more than the house, the span of Blair Athol Road. I’m the Crooked Spire warping itself, doubled up over town. I measure myself against the sky in its winter coat, peat traces in water, air locked in the radiators at night, against my own held breath, or your unfinished sentences, your hand on my back like a passenger touching the dashboard when a driver brakes, as if they could slow things down. I measure myself against love — heavier, lighter than both of us.

Inside the Northern General they’re trying to burn away a small piece of your heart. I want to know which bit, how much and what it holds. My questions live between what doctors call the heart and what we mean by it, wide as the gap between brain and mind. And in our lineage of bypassed hearts we should be grateful for the literal. I know my heart is your heart — good for running, not much else and later as you sit up in your borrowed bed I get the whole thing wrong, call it oblation. Offering or sacrifice. As if you’d given something up. As if their tiny fire was ritual and we could warm by it.