Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart is Not Breaking

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron starwould weigh six billion tons.

Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth.

Including the insects.

Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief—just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star.

How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.

How difficult it is to move then.

How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness.

One is the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars.

One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer