When they call you heavy

When they call you ‘heavy’, 
I feel like asking, “Heavy how? Like an anchor that holds a ship amongst turbulence? 
Or like a backpack laden with books and loaded onto a child on the way to school? 
Perhaps I’m a mule, camel or beast of burden that is stubbornly refusing to do another day of work without some rest? 

How exactly am I heavy, so heavy, that you feel so light telling me so?
That it rolls so effortlessly off your tongue, that you assume my heart isn’t also just as heavy?  

Heavy with hurt, heavy with guilt, heavy with rage and remorse, so heavy that it makes me consider all things heavily, and the reason for my heaviness is that I haven’t yet released it onto you or the world.”

You retract, and change,
reorient your words like shuffling cards, but it’s the same deck and now you say, “No, not heavy that way, but like, you’re too much”. 

Again, I ask, “What exactly do you mean? Am I a price tag that you don’t want to pay for, am I a book too thick to consider reading? Perhaps you mean, I’m a plate that you’re too full to even look at let alone eat from. Please, tell me, am I rain that doesn’t cease, heat that is unbearable, or are all my offerings, all that I am, everything I have learned and developed into, is any of that what you mean?”

Maybe you failed to consider a man who has weight will be the workhorse to provide for you if you just offer me enough room to find a semblance of myself, and be the pillow I lay my head on. 

I could be mediocre and get by, I could be just a fly in a room, just there, that eventually annoys you.

Or is being too much, only too much because you want to cut me down, is being too heavy a veiled cry from you for me to slow down, be less, think less, heart less, because you don’t want to do any more, or you just can’t tolerate the pain of seeing someone engage with their entirety, whilst you offer…… nothing?

Because, if you prefer, I could be too little, and I could be a weightless thing.

Wesam El dahabi