pebbles

Everyone knows that when someone is hurting, they are heavier.

The light in their eyes turns to sludge, and it sinks down into the soles of their feet, swamping the skipping joy in the tips of their toes.

Their lips are bowed, gently tugged downwards by the weight of their pain, and betraying everything and nothing all at once.

Their back is arched, burdened by the world, hauled down by it. The body curves and stays that way, more like stone every day.

But hardest to see and even harder to bear is in the heart. Every hurt is a pebble, threaded onto heartstrings, sinking below the tip of the breastbone like a necklace.

This heaviness is within, invisible, and its weight is the fiercest, drawing shutters over the eyes, and catching you in time like molasses, creeping and consuming and forever-seeming.

Sometimes the heartstrings snap, and with a gasp, the pebbles clatter down into the soul, the soles of the feet, and then you cannot move, only weep as your broken heartstrings hang limp behind your ribs. The pebbles turn your feet, your legs to stone, and however much you may wish to run, you cannot.

Sometimes people endure so many small heavy hurts that the pebble necklace grows too long. Long enough that it wraps around their neck and their wrists and covers their eyes and gags them, and they are changed, chained.

Sometimes the pebble necklace in someone's heart drags them straight to their grave.

Sometimes the pebbles are so heavy that life and light and laughter are hopeless.

Sometimes the necklace chokes you.

Sometimes it breaks.

But sometimes you can slide you fingers between your ribs, draw those heartstrings out from their cage, and however painful it may be, you can slip the pebbles from the necklace.

one

by

one.

Count them.

Polish them.

Kiss them.

And eventually, cast them away.