The sternum splits like a walnut hull, quiet and certain. Just the crack of bone learning to unveil, to be uninhibited. What emerges is not small. It is the size of a horse, dark and slick, chambers large enough to echo. It beats once in my hands before I let it go, watch it rise. Gravity forgets what it knows. The heart rises, bound to nothing, hovering where the moon should be. It hangs there, casting no light but demanding to be seen. I stand beneath it, neck craned, chest hollow and cooling. The night breathes differently now. Stars shift their positions around this new body, this organ that once kept me alive.

Then: the draining. Not sudden, but predestined. Blood retreats through invisible wounds, pulled by some thirst I cannot name. It's unremitting. The heart pales, shrinks inward, tissue collapsing like a fist unclenching. It becomes paper, relic and the husk of itself. Where it was scarlet and flushed, it turns the same kind of grey of moths' wings, of forgotten prayers. Still it hangs, refuses to fall. The moon never returns. Something else presides over the night now, something born from me: a viscera I once carried, grown too large for my ribs, thrown into the sky to rule over nothing. The tides forget their rhythms, yet, the world learns to live beneath it.

I walk through days with the absence rattling in my chest, a vacancy that sounds like wind through a barn. People ask questions I cannot answer, their voices muffled by the distance between their hearts and mine. At night I look up at what I've lost, at what I've made. The heart sways gently in the wind, a dried monument to some god of feeling too much, some deity of excess. It doesn't glow, but sometimes, when the air is right, it casts a shadow. I stand in that shadow, in the dark shape of my own excess, and I wonder if this is what I wanted all along: to be emptied, to see proof of what I once housed, to finally sleep without the work of loving and pumping and trying to keep every distant star alive inside me.

The astronomers don't know what to call it. They measure it, chart its position, wait for it to move. It doesn't. It hangs where I left it, ruling nothing but my dreams, where it tears open again and again, pouring out moths in grey clouds, born from a different valve, all of them looking for light that isn't there anymore. They circle the dried heart, thinking it's a moon, batting their wings against its paper texture. They're searching for warmth, for the beating that used to be there, but there's only the night and a chest that learned how to open and couldn't figure out how to close again.