November Walk the Plank- Nano Excerpt

This month for the YA Buccaneers Walk the Plank challenge, I'm posting an excerpt from my Nano work in progress: LOVE AND OTHER CURIOSITIES. I've never posted an excerpt of my writing on my blog before. (Particularly one that has not be edited or revised in any way.) Eeep! Well, here goes... *closes eyes* *hits post* *ignores nagging impulse to take it immediately back down*

The Curious Calibration of the Apparatus of the Human Heart

There are places that change you. Moments in time which rearrange all your pieces and moving parts in such a way that you are new and wholly yourself at the same time.

            There is a twisting and untwisting of sinews, cogs set in motion such that the hitherto dormant chamber in your mind is thrown open and all the light pours in. And the whole precarious alignment of the apparatus suddenly rings true with a single, pure and solitary note. And you find the timbre of your heart is in perfect tune. Even if you didn’t realize it at the time. Even if you were just a child. Or perhaps more particularly because it was so. When your thoughts were still tender and not fully formed. And I was just a child. And I was told countless times to stop with my wild remembrances and imaginings. So much so, that I stopped speaking of them out loud. But they never left.

            It matters not how many heartbeats you possessed before that day, or how many countless heartbeats had since passed. That day had entered your blood and no matter how many times you breathed in or out, it would never leave you.

            Because that note, once rung cannot be undone. There is a thrill inside your chest that sounds like home. There is a scent. A quality of light. And of course she is there.

            And how many nights between sleeping and waking, I imagined what I would say to her, if I saw her again after all these years. And those imaginings took on life, and we, in a sense, grew up together.