That landing strip with no runway lights where you are aiming your plane, imagining a voice in the tower, imagining a tower.

From Kim Addonizio’s “My Heart”

A section from my Washington essay, “The Unspeakable Gift.”

On my third day, I had a 3-D cardiac MRI. Like the entrance to
a dragon ride at a carnival, the rolling, bed-like platform takes you into
the mouth of the beast. I walked into the room, and the nurse—who looked
as if she could run a marathon in two hours—asked about buckles or other
metal on my clothes. She handed me a headset-like contraption to mitigate
the loud noise. I’d be inside the machine for an hour while the doctor
administered the test, which would produce a three-dimensional movie of my
heart’s activity. The doctor arrived and the procedure began. The sound of
the machine was deafening, and I seemed to lie there forever.

The movie my heart produced—part video game, part Discovery
Channel—was brief. I saw my heart beating on a small screen. Muscles moved
with the fluidity of a ballet dancer. Blood flowed like a river. Valves
opened and closed as elegantly as a bird’s wings. The components of my
heart worked together in such a way that I left convinced of a God. The
experience of seeing a 3-D film of my heart was intimate and distant,
natural and artificial.

The cardiac MRI was one of many tests focused on my heart. The
heart is one of the primary organs affected by Turner syndrome, so it
received a thorough evaluation. The knowledge that this organ would get a
tremendous amount of attention was one of the primary reasons I’d been
scared to participate in the study, but I knew I needed to do it. Every
inch of the grand muscle was checked for shape, strength, and
function.

I had lived my entire life not knowing my heart. Finishing a
marathon seven years earlier hadn’t convinced me it was healthy. My family
history of cardiac disease surrounded my heart in a shroud. I can’t
describe the relief on the face of the technician who broke the rules
(only doctors are supposed to reveal test results) and told me my aorta
had fully functioning valves or the affirming nod by another one who read
my EKG. I can only say a weight in me was lifted with each revelation.
Textbook pictures of malformed hearts no longer matched mine. The
premature deaths of family members were countered with each piece of
positive evidence.