Fizzy Hearts
I can tell her what her silly little juice box says and the red flowers sing: that alongside horror, there is always hope.
I put my hand over hers, guiding the spoon into the bowl of baking soda. Together we sprinkle it over the white paper hearts, covering each one with a powdery layer. I squint over my phone screen to see the next step: mix vinegar and food coloring. In a Pinterest-fueled state of over-ambition, I decided that this afternoon would be a good time for an art project with my toddler.
I shake the tiny plastic bottles of food coloring into the bowl, letting out drops of color into the vinegar. My daughter picked the colors—red, yellow, and blue—although, in their bowls, they all look a murky black.
After figuring out how to squeeze the end of the glass pipette so that the colorful liquid fills the dropper, she carefully moves her arm from the food coloring to her paper heart and drops the liquid over the baking soda.
With each drop, the paper heart erupts into a bubbly burst of color. The red bleeds into the blue, creating a pool of purple. The yellow barely makes it to the paper, but we tip the heart, and a yellow line shoots down the middle, sprouting fizzing veins into the other colors. My daughter turns her head so her ear is inches from the paper, her hair falling into the paint. She listens to the foaming and popping for a minute before dropping in more color.
The weather that day was a strange mix of rain, snow, and hail, on and off all afternoon. After the art project, we head outside to the market. There is a break in the weather, the sun surprisingly warm, and the wind dying down. Light spills into the street.
Walking back home, my daughter finds snails along the road. She picks each one of them up, closely examining the empty shells, and carries them gingerly in her hand back to our street.
The roar of a helicopter sounds overhead, flying south, the second one that day and one of many this week. The apartment unit on the second floor of the building directly across from us, usually empty, is occupied by evacuees from the earthquake. Each night this week, as I wash dishes, I see a man standing out on the balcony for long lengths of time, longer than comfortable in below-freezing temps. He stares out over the town, not looking at anything in particular, but simply to have something on which to fix his gaze.
My daughter throws the snails into a puddle but not before I ask if they’ll sink or float, trying to squeeze a science lesson into our afternoon. They float, and the holes in the empty shells propel them to move in concentric circles around the water, making them seem alive, like they are going for a leisurely swim.
Back inside, I unpack the things we picked up from the market: fresh bread for dinner that night, milk, yogurt, and a juice box. I puncture the box with the plastic straw to give to my daughter. Before I do, I notice on the side of the box words that in English say “filled with joy.”
It seems laughable at best and irreverent at worst: a colorful cardboard juice box with a cheeky cartoon apricot telling the drinker they are filled with joy. I take a quick picture of it before handing it to my daughter because its message seemed significant, despite its indecency.
The same day as the earthquake, the chrysanthemums I had bought in the fall, but had long since died, bloomed a crimson red.
While the earth cracked down the middle, there, on the balcony, the petals opened wide in the frozen, old dirt. The new flowers raised their faces to the heavens and followed the light.
The red blooms seemed almost scandalous in their defiance, oblivious to the suffering happening around them that day. But there they were, bursting open, living in the moment of this one fragile life.
A 2-month-old baby is pulled from the rubble, alive, 128 hours after the earthquake hit. A 17-year-old girl, 248 hours after—10 days. Groups set up stations to serve hot meals. A mobile bakery operated by culinary students gives out bread. A man makes cotton candy for the children. A video goes viral of a street cat being freed from the rubble. He sits on the shoulders of a rescue worker, nuzzling his helmet.
I look at my daughter and her curls streaked with red food coloring. We move the paper hearts off the table to dry in the window. Each time we pick up a heart, the still-wet paint swirls and mixes, creating more colors, and giving off a bubbling fizz.
I tuck a rogue curl behind her ear. I don’t know why earthquakes happen, I want to tell her. I don’t know why people, who already shoulder too much trauma and injustice, have their homes and their loved ones swallowed into the ground. I don’t know why a baby born when the earthquake hit—named by the hospital staff, Aya, meaning ‘a sign from God’—is pulled from the rubble alive, but her mother, father, and siblings are not.
I don’t know why politicians keep gaining when the world’s most vulnerable keep losing.
But I can tell her what her silly little juice box says and the red flowers sing: that alongside horror, there is always hope.
I can tell her that there is something far bigger than us that will always push against the darkness—that this isn’t the end of the story.
And I'd tell her that it’s the way our hearts were made: big enough to absorb all the explosions that come with life, tender enough to make all the hard corners soft—soft to ourselves and soft to others.
We all have that little fizz in our hearts, whispering a quiet song, telling us that though these circumstances feel so incredibly bleak, the smallest bit of hope will keep us moving forward—
—in the most unbearable, heartbreaking way.
And I'd tell her that it’s the way our hearts were made: big enough to absorb all the explosions that come with life, tender enough to make all the hard corners soft—soft to ourselves and soft to others.
I will be thinking about this line for weeks Sarah. Such a beautiful story.
This brought me to tears this morning. Thank you for writing, Sarah.