Anonymous

I have an elephant.
She is enormous and dreadfully heavy.
She sits on my lap and holds me down with weight.
Sometimes she is so burdensome
I can barely breathe and yet it also feels so comforting to hold her.
A reminder of all I have lost.
Gravity.

Her eyes are sad and tired.
Wrinkles trace her face and her trunk hangs low to the ground.
It doesn’t blast the glorious trumpet sounds it was made for.

She looks out hoping to be noticed. She is in fact an elephant.
How could anyone miss her?
But you do.

Your eyes dart about very carefully as to not to make eye contact with her.
You lean to the side and peer around her wide body to see my face.
You start to talk, but you don’t talk about her.
You don’t even acknowledge her.

When it’s my turn I nervously say,
“I have this elephant, you see....”

But you don’t want to hear about my elephant.

So I hold her and I talk with you about other things.
It feels really silly to talk about anything else when there is this colossal, stoic creature in my lap, but I do.

And then before I know it,
I’m ignoring her too.

Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash