I had always imagined your heart to be tiny,
Small like a hummingbird's.

Not because you were incapable of love,
But because you had the capacity for so much of it.

It fluttered at the briefest of glances
And jumped at the slightest of touches.

So fast did your heart beat that I had often mistaken you for dead
When I would wrap my hands around your throat.

You ran and you called and you pleaded
But no one could hear your little heart.

Even as it stuttered frantically
Against your rib cage, brittle as paper.

No one wants to love a quiet heart.

And so I took it and strung it on a chain of gold
So it could sit silently atop my own heart.