You Don’t Love With Your Heart; You Love With Your Gut

You don’t love with your heart; you love with your gut. You ingest small quirks of another and make them a part of you; churning within your body with memories that you slowly absorb, pushing them till they form part of your blood, like nutrition. You feed on it, breaking morsels down to particles, with saliva that tells you how it tastes so good and you wouldn’t ever have anything else. It cleanses your insides, making you a better person, happy and well fed. It nourishes your brain, makes endorphins dance around in a way that shows in your two feet. It regenerates.

You make way for more to come, pushing away the inessentials and absorbing all that seems good. Particle by particle, it collects in you, growing pinch by pinch; salt and sugar. It grows till it hurts one day, clogging inside of you, the sweetness that your gut cannot tell the taste of. The bile that rushes to your dry throat, leaving an unforeseen bitterness that would recur but refuse to leave the system. You want more of it, but you cannot seem to handle what you’ve already got.

You call this love a part of you: your heart, an essential organ that hurts so bad but you can’t live without. No matter how tight you grip your chest, the pain doesn’t fade because it resides in your gut, the appendix. You gag till tears run down your eyes, wanting to let it all out, but it doesn’t. You laxate, meditate, detox, and eventually have your appendix removed; that godforsaken organ that had no use inside you. Healing slowly, you blame the heart for the hurt it caused, not realizing that you only followed what your gut had to say.