it’s not the weight of it that bothers me

not the small oval pressing against the hollow

between throat and bone,

but the fact that it refuses to learn softness.

each morning i plead with it,

turn gentler, i whisper,

take the shape of skin, my blood, my life,

bend to the pulse that feeds you.

but it does not acquiesce.

it drinks my warmth like a slow thief,

glows gold for a moment, to mock me

for believing that heat is affection.

i keep giving and it continues taking, never melting.

still, i wear it,

you see, i can’t throw it away.

i have tried, unclasped it with full force,

watched the chain slither from my fingers

like the sentences i could not finish.

but the air felt too light after, too possible,

too cruel in its freedom.

so i take it back each time, the metal warming again,

siphoning my body heat into its indifference.

it does not love me back,

but it knows how to stay.

and that is what undoes me.

the knowledge that what cuts deepest

is also what keeps me tethered,

and that grief is not separate from love,

never separate from it.

so, what else can i do but keep it close,

this small, beastly, unrelenting thing,

pressing against the bone, asking nothing,

and teaching me everything

about the impossibility

of tenderness.