When We Get Blackheart

An aged farmer slices into a potato and the flesh gives way with a soft, wet sigh. The skin is perfect. Smooth, unblemished, and the colour of prairie earth after rain.

## I.

But then the knife reveals something else. A hollow black core, soft to the touch, collapsing inward like a mineshaft. This is **blackheart**. It happens when oxygen can’t reach the centre. It doesn’t rot from bacteria or mold, not at first. It simply can’t breathe. It happens underground, in the dark, when the tuber is starved of air. The outside betrays nothing. You only discover the ruin when you split it open.

From the outside, you’d never guess the heart has gone black.

## II.

May came with lilacs and a degree and the end of everything I thought I’d been building toward. I should have felt victorious. I’d survived four years of close reading and annotated biblographies, late nights in the library, the weight of expectations I’d placed on myself like stones in my pockets. But something had happened during those years, something invisible and irreversible. I missed my own convocation and felt nothing. Not relief. Not pride. A vast, echoing emptiness where my future was supposed to live.

Couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t read. My thoughts congealed into a single, dull pulse: *what now, what now, what now.*

By the time I noticed, the rot had already set in.

I think about this often now, in November, when we’re supposed to raise awareness for men’s mental health. How many of us walk around looking fine? Skin intact, no visible wounds, while something essential has gone dark inside. We call it burnout, depression, the weight of masculinity. We, too, are stored in darkness. Airless rooms. Dead screens. The hiss of the heater trying to make the air move.

We don’t call it what it is. Suffocation. The slow death that happens when we can’t let air in. The outside looks fine. It’s only when you slice into it that the truth surfaces.

## III.

Sylvia Plath wrote about a fig tree. Each branch held a different life: husband, children, poet, professor, lover, traveler. She sat in the crotch of that tree, paralyzed, watching the figs shrivel and blacken and drop. One by one. Because she couldn’t choose.

I know that tree. I’ve been sitting in it for years.

The figs are fickle things. They sour when microorganisms—bacteria, yeasts, fungi—enter through the eye, the *ostiole*, that small opening at the tip. They break down the flesh from the inside. No different from the potato’s blackheart. No different than the ancient Evil Eye, that blue talisman we use as an emoji now. Divorced from its original weight. The eye as entry point. The mirror we hold up that shows us what we don’t want to see.

What has entered my own eye? 🧿

I think about Robert Frost’s poem, the one e