I'd always thought that being seen was about what people perceived with their eyes. But the truth is, it barely even gets you twelve years.ĭ URING THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF SEVENTH grade, I'd learned one thing above all else: A person can become invisible simply by staying quiet. It does what it needs to do, one beat after another, until it gets the message that it's time to stop, which might happen a few minutes from now, and you don't even know it.īecause some hearts beat only about 412 million times. You don't turn, you don't smile, you just keep looking out at the sea, and neither of you knows what matters about this moment, or what's about to happen (how could you?).Īnd the whole while, your heart just keeps going. Your mom is off at your side somewhere she's taking a picture, and you know you should turn to her and smile.īut you don't. Meanwhile, the waves keep rolling over your toes, one after another (like a heartbeat, almost-you can notice or not), and the elastic is digging in, and perhaps what you notice, more than the sun or the straps, is how cold the water is, or the way the waves create hollow places in the wet sand beneath your feet. You are as alive as anybody else right now. Maybe you notice that your bathing suit straps are just a little too tight on your sunburned shoulders or that the sun is too bright in your eyes. Maybe while you're standing there, you're looking at sparkles of white light on dark ocean, wondering if it's worth getting your hair wet again. It's beating when you're sleeping, when you're watching TV, when you're standing at the beach with your toes in the sand. And yet here's your heart, doing its job all the time, one beat after the next, all the way up to three billion. Three billion years, and life itself barely exists.
Count back three billion hours, and modern humans don't exist-just wild-eyed cave people, all hairy and grunting. I was thinking about that, trying to imagine a number that large. Turton says that if you lived to be eighty years old, your heart would beat three billion times. Jellyfish don't even have hearts, of course-no heart, no brain, no bone, no blood. Like a ghost heart-a heart you can see right through, right into some other world where everything you ever lost has gone to hide. It's their pulse, the way they contract swiftly, then release. It doesn't matter what kind: the blood-red Atolla with its flashing siren lights, the frilly flower hat variety, or the near-transparent moon jelly, Aurelia aurita. A JELLYFISH, IF YOU WATCH IT LONG ENOUGH, begins to look like a heart beating.
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