Neutron Star

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would 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, Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking

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Not A Sprint

Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!

Robert Browning, Pheidippides

It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.

It has been a marathon, sans doute.

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Quarter Century

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what
they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten,
and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and
three, and two, and one…

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion
or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden
dolls that fit one inside the other,

each year inside the next
one.

—Sandra Cisneros

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