Freeze your love for safe-keeping. Call it grief.
Let it burn when you pick it up and hold it too long. The wet on your hands- and the sting of it- will teach your brain to be afraid of the melting.
The melting burns.
The melting worries you because, how will you catch it all? What if you lose something in the transition?
You had to freeze it to protect it. You had to.
How do you protect something that waves and rolls? Something that runs and falls? Something that can be swallowed down?
You can't, so you stop the time of it.
Freeze it safe.
Fill your hands with frozen until it bites.
Remember when it had no teeth?
Remember when it was all mirrors and depth. Something you could sink into. Something you sank into, time and time again.
Remember time.
She runs fast, even through the frozen. The sea could take her strides, but the glacier cracks.
Shave that corner down, and save it. Let it be liquid.
Better that than fall away. Better that, than cut you.
It is ocean, even when it is only one spoonful deep. Even when the rest is still shock-frozen-safe-kept.
Talk to it.
Notice how it does not hurt to hold it when you let it free of freeze.
Tell it the truth. The sad truth. The truth that makes your bones ache from the inside, the one that silenced your heart.
Tell it how it no longer has a proper bed. How the earth eroded around it. How you saved the whole of it, glaciered it safe.
Ask what it wants: to stay safe and whole, or to fold into your sea? Be honest. Say how it will lose its shape then. How you will not be able to come to it, and just it, any longer. How it will blend into all love, into all you.
Watch as it sloshes in your spoon, craving waves, aching for movement at all costs.
Eventually, you will drink it as it wants to be drank. Your heart will sing again and you will not know whose song it is.
Did yours come back? Or is this how ice melodies when it returns to form?
Hold the rest, frozen, when you need the burn. Sing to it. Remember safe. Pretend you've outrun time.
And if it aches to stretch again, to splash again, melt your grief for more living. Call it love.
Take your time.
You can do this spoon by spoon.
.
.
Inspired by a conversation in my comments section with Lillian, a friend and a fellow Pepper: https://humaninrecovery.wordpress.com/