Conversations with Grace and a story about heavy hearts

Grace

She helps me realized in my lowest moments
that the things that make me feel heavy are actually gifts.

I wasn't meant to keep it all in. We're meant to talk through it all, and I'm meant to share love in its limitless forms. Here is a story about how heavy love can feel... and where it took me.



Everything is Too Heavy


i've spent a lot of time thinking of you, trying to be intentional in the ways i care for you... trying not to expose too much or be too involved, but you saw right through me, i think. i was starting to let myself love you. and i started to believe it could work. i could be patient, let you be where you are. and maybe one day you could thrive and love me all at once. my body was fluid to you, my emotions rocks, and the current became heavy with torment. how we managed i do not know. you kept your rocks far from me, but i knew you had them too.

i wanted to give you everything. you didn't want everything, everything is too heavy, so at night i floated on your bed in a place where as long as we were touching it was okay to feel. i loved you in those moments. it wasn't fair.

i began to examined the crack that formed in my heart. living there, a tiny bud pulled by threads of hope crept through the lining while i was sleeping, and pushed out against heart-ache fear and worry. This new seedling longed to tangle up with things alive in you. begging to love, to live, to exist and be cared for. i didn't mean for this to happen, but it went on happening. especially when we were close. instead of speaking, i kissed you. this was so much easier, i held the words in and let the truth skim the surface of your body. at least thats how i wished it was.

i don't know if i ever found a way to care for you, now i am too wrecked to try and it saddens me. i would have loved to lift you with my love but it always got so heavy. Because we didn't want the weight of it all, it is as though we gave nothing and got nothing in return. living on a wish, we are being pushed apart like seeds from a dandelion, unaware as we float in the sunbeams that the ground will keep us covered in our separate homes.

the action we used and what we avoided naming brought on the growth of so many emotions. i think i would have felt it all in a purer form without the complication of my pulsing veins and your rhythmic breath above me. but i have no way of knowing that truth. i was afraid that without us sharing our bodies we would have no reason to come together. there was an urgency to make love, to make it good, to stay up all night. i knew it was ending, we had to act fast. but i let it slow down, and you pursued another love with all of your rocks ready to unpack, with all of yourself intact. while i had to break myself off and away. now i'm left with anger, lack of needs, needing to protect myself. never wanting to come close again. you deceived me with your body and your gentle kisses on my neck, i was too afraid to know what was happening in me, you told me from the start it wasn't what you wanted. it was all i had to give.

because we exposed our bodies before our hearts everything is crumbling, and covered up with sadness. you apologized for having to cut the flower growing out of me. something that grew to admire you, now to be admired as freshly cut flowers are admired; in a vase, out of their element left to soak up what water they can without their roots.

i asked if we could put rocks there instead. but nothing seems to be alive anymore. your only choice is to move on. the story i provided for you will help you navigate in the future but i'll never exist to you as i am. those burdensome parts of me have been rightfully neglected, you let them sink below you. i carry them still, in my dark places, even though they are my brightest strengths, and similar to yours.

evidence of what we were can fit in an envelope, two tiny sheets of paper. relics from the war, a summer romance you wouldn't even call your own. i walk away with my most full heart and let it all deflate until nothing breathes there anymore. and i try to wake up again as if nothing had ever happened, as if everything hadn't lived for those moments. history, the dead story i write about now. the story i can only mourn for so long. because i've got to let go. because the story changes each day.


(afterthought--after speaking with my mother Grace)
i dont want to put life back in my dead flowers or re-write the pages over again, i want new growth, i want to stay connected to my roots and let my love flow out in new places. if nothing else, rejection leaves me with the desire to create more than i thought possible, if i can't have this there must be more out there. i will not let my heart die, i am inhaling new breath all the time. our bodies are powerful regenerators, and we will sprout new buds in the same vulnerable space where old growth has run through its life cycle. i'll use all the materials to be new, and to let myself share love with the world, because i was built for this and i am most happy when i give lovingly.

Rejection made me afraid i would have to learn to keep my love inside for ever, but i am built this way and that can never be put to shame in a closed off place in me; its got to reach the surface. I must share my love with the world, let it be kindness to strangers or encouragment to those who i love or speaking for those who get forgotten and taken advantage of. i have all of this in me and its so heavy it hurts, but its so light it could fly in a hundred directions. i am opening a cage of birds in me, because giving to others is how i give myself hope and how i realize the working order of a loving world, messy with dreams and scraps and hugs and gifts. filled up with the power to try again, all the time. we're working in this world, and i couldn't pick a better landscape for creating beauty with all we have inside.