How heavy is your heart, really?

"Im fine"

When I say “I’m fine,” I wish someone would ask,

“How heavy is your heart, really?”

I wish, when I told them the weight of oceans, they’d respond,

“In what unit?”

Then maybe I could take a round of breaths— alkaline air spilling into my lungs, liquid coating my tongue until the shape of it made sense.

I don’t want them to fix it- I want them to help me hold it for a moment.

Some days, my heart is sadness, tethering me tightly inside myself. Other days, it’s a melancholic joy— like sitting in a bright room with one window, storm pounding against the glass.

And sometimes, I just want it to be okay to say,

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“It’s filled with air.”

In that emptiness, I don’t reside anywhere. On the worst days, my heart feels like negative ten pounds. Deflated. Folded inward. Caving into the hollowness of my own chest. Other times, it’s fifteen pounds of static. Buzzing through me. Not quite pain, not quite peace— just electric numbness, like carbonated air trapped beneath my skin.

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How heavy is your heart?

So heavy, I feel resistance in my core when I try to speak.

Sometimes, it’s an eight-pound bowling ball— hurtling forward. Myself, sliding across a lane built for impact.

Other times, I’m the three-pound pin— upright, still, waiting for collision. Knocked down, then pulled upright again, readied for another round.

More often than not, my heart is a helpless mixture: happiness, anticipatory grief, ancestral sadness, dread, a shimmer of anxiety, a shadow of depression, a leftover pang of heartbreak— all wrapped in a sack of gratitude, self-awareness, and the quiet knowing that there is no other option but forward.

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My feelings are a diagnosis.

I say: “I’m fine.” More accurately—

my heart weighs 1,720-foot tsunami waves, measured in the ache of holding it all without letting it show.

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