First, love was the filmy layer to be superimposed over boys
for whom I yearned but never knew
Then, languishing in replacement love,
a stain from benign and anxiously perceived “wild days”
Neither patient nor kind
Not an elaborate loom,
with threads stretching fingers across to grasp and weave into irrevocable fabric,
the warmest, strongest knit
More an inevitable hammer to be wielded for my own good
But now -
Now
Terror seeps from my pores
My stomach a lackluster container for its dense weight
I devour grief
Hoard it to borrow against the wave to come,
In which some version of myself forever tumbles like a rag doll in the crashing, roiling grief
And this is love,
The horror of the innate knowledge of not knowing
The certainty of collapse
The tenuous hold on the most precious and fragile
As we scrape and scramble to hold the delicate bloom just a few moments longer
And the interest always always comes due