You never know what someone else is going through.
Please—share this video. With a friend. With your family. With a colleague.
RISKING LOVE audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. Poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here.
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To see all the videos on the album visit here.
“Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking” is the fifteenth and final track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
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, from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)