Heartstorm

by David Stalling

Love came to me like something wild,
not soft,
not careful,
but alive.

It ran through me
like wind through a mountain pass:
untamed,
unquestioned,
fierce in its freedom.

I didn’t try to hold it.
You don’t cage something wild
without killing it.
So I let it roam,
through every quiet corner of me,
until my heart
was no longer still,
but a living wilderness.

And then,
the breaking.

Not a moment,
but a season turning.

Like a river in early spring,
I felt the surface give way,
ice splitting with a sound
too deep to stop.

What once held firm
fractured into drifting pieces,
slow at first,
then all at once,
pressure releasing
in a violent letting go.

I felt it in my chest,
that shifting,
cracking weight,
love breaking apart
into what I could not gather.

Then came the flood.
Rushing,
merciless,
breaking every boundary.

Grief carved rivers through me,
dragging pieces of him
through places I thought were safe.

Somewhere in the distance,
an avalanche fell,
everything we built
collapsing under its own weight,
burying the version of me
that believed in forever.

This is what it means
to have a wild heart:

It does not love halfway.
It does not brace for the storm.
It opens,
knowing the sky can break.

And still,
I would choose it again.

The breaking ice,
the rising flood,
the fall that splits the ground beneath me
because before the ruin
there was something vast,
untamed,
and real.

Something wild.

To love like that
is to belong to nature,
to freeze,
to fracture,
to be carried forward
and remade.

The river does not regret the thaw.
The mountain does not regret the fall.
The earth does not regret the storm.

Neither will I.

Because even now,
standing in the aftermath,
heart split open to the sky,
I feel it:

Something stirring beneath the ruin.

A stubborn life.
Green through blackened earth.
Water finding its path again.
A pulse that will not quiet.

The wild does not end.
It waits.

And one day,
without warning,
without permission,
my heart will run free again:

Reckless,
open,
unafraid
of everything it risks
just to feel alive.