I wade in this water to find its source.

I bought a house for myself

thinking secretly

that I just needed to build an island

where attachment and loss couldn't find me,

I'd dig a moat, 

I thought,

where all of the glittery things could drown

before they hooked into my heart.

But soon after 

I began fixating on house fires

and my pets' frantic eyes

and their little cowering bodies

and so then the sad admittance 

that to live is to attach and to love and to lose

and I told myself

if i lose one more big thing

just drop me off at an institution

where they have those quick drugs

that turn the tidal waves to sloshing

and the clawing into swaying

and the horrible, endless falling

into poof
nothing at all.

It all comes down to this,

Not, how to not suffer,

but how to not be afraid

of the suffering.

Because I think that

that horrible, endless falling

and the tidal waves

and the frantic clawing

are actually in the fear,

and not in the suffering at all.