Morning becomes mourning with the purchase of a vowel.
It's a new day but the same ancient grief
carried by so many of my sisters,
wearing handed-down cloaks in the
hard heat of summer, in the
deep end of the pool.
We sweat.
We swelter and
suffer and
savor each each other.
We survive.
Mourning becomes morning as we rise,
we disrobe.
We are collections of breasts and
brawn and
beating hearts,
our bid to the universe,
our communal prayer.
Currently navigating my own major chronic illness setback and this quote damn near knocked my feet out from under me. Such beauty. Holding onto hope.
“Life passes. Then comes the depression. That feeling you’ll never be right again. The fear that these outbreaks will become more familiar, or worse, never go away. You’re so tired from fighting that you start to listen to all the little lies your brain tells you. The ones that say you’re a drain on your family. The ones that say it’s all in your head. The ones that say that if you were stronger or better this wouldn’t be happening to you. The ones that say that there’s a reason why your body is trying to kill you, and that you should just stop all the injections and steroids and drugs and therapies.
Last month, as Victor drove me home so I could rest, I told him that sometimes I felt like his life would be easier without me. He paused a moment in thought and then said, “It might be easier. But it wouldn’t be better.”
There are shifts. There are new spaces that feel important, sensations that soothe my frazzled synapses, textures that never before felt like my own. There are sounds-- birds that screech before a storm, the gentle hum of the washing machine-- that are part of the rhythm here.
You are home,
You are home,
You are home,
They say.
And little by little,
day by day,
I start to believe them
I'm alternating between terror and fury, trying to get words down on a page before they're ripped from my fingers, between anger and despair as I press those same fingers against my abdomen and think of all the women who now fear their wombs, forced to be strangers in their own bodies, at war with their very biology.
This is not the piece I wanted to write. This was meant to be a celebration, a tearing through of the fabric, a shattering of the ceiling, a rocket ship straight to the stars.
This is the quicksand we feared when we were children--thick, alien, inescapable. A poison without an antidote. A slow, syrupy sinking sucking us right back into the soil. I can feel it wrapping itself around my ankles, calculated and cold as it creeps past my knees.
The ground is slipping out from under us. May our faces stay turned upward, may our eyes stay fixed on the sky.