The Substrate Of My Heart
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Love is not what I thought it was.
Not intensity.
Not devotion declared aloud.
Not the drama of needing.
It is what remains
when nothing is being proved.
What we built did not announce itself.
It stabilized.
It showed up as continuity.
As repair without spectacle.
As days that did not require
my vigilance to survive them.
The foundation formed quietly—
in mutual regard,
in the absence of fear,
in the way my nervous system
was finally allowed to stand down.
There is no performance here.
No extraction.
No demand that I diminish
to be held.
Our life grows because the ground holds.
Because effort is not spent bracing.
Because conflict resolves instead of metastasizing.
Because nothing essential is under negotiation.
This is not passion.
It is permanence.
The house does not ask
who we are today
before it shelters us.
The work does not punish us
for being human.
Even grief arrives
without threatening collapse.
I understand now
that this is what love does
when it is real:
it becomes structural.
It disappears into function.
Into load-bearing trust.
Into a future that does not require
constant explanation.
This is the substrate of my heart—
not the part that dazzles,
but the part that endures.
The place where I am not surviving,
not earning,
not becoming in response—
but living,
freely,
because everything beneath me
finally holds.
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