My heart is a 10-pound brick.
It lays heavy in my belly like the chocolate chip cookies,
brownie and carrot cake I ate today,
because I am too wise to drink my grief.
I did not know when I met you,
two years ago, that
I was signing up for this, this
miles between my body and yours, this
weeks and months between my body and yours, this
great-grandmother of lessons in patience.
I thought it was just a sweet moment between friends,
nothing more than an aberration of good-bye.
I could not have foreseen that you would take my heart
and hold it so securely in your own.
I did not know I would be on this roller-coaster ride of
should I? shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t. I should.
The I Will of me sometimes ghosting in the shadows of the
I Cannot of me.
The weight of me topples over
contained cars and safety bars, I am
plunging then flailing
watching the pavement reach up to shatter me.
But.
Unfailingly
you arrive on the down side,
scoop me up like hero
and once again
we are leaning back, faces turned skyward.
My heart is an anvil,
unmovable in its grief.
The pain I cause you in my wavering
sharper,
stronger than the pain of my own questioning.
I did not know when I met you,
over two years ago now,
that the pain I’d feel in your pain
would displace my own.
Until once again,
I am over the edge of loving you,
deeper,
deeper down the
rabbit hole of impossibilities becoming actualities.
I did not know back then
when you were just the friend of a friend, that
love doesn’t always come instantly.
My heart is an anchor.
It has landed in you.
I could not have foreseen
two and a half years ago,
how you would become my sanctuary
and a tether to ground.
An anchor holds.
An anchor also holds you down.
I have stopped needing to know which.
My heart is an anchor.
It has landed in you.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2014