I sit in my little house and look at the walls, and look at how the furniture fits so nicely with the overall picture, and I plot colors and wall hangings.
And I feel like the woman who built the Winchester house. Keep the spirits at bay.
I'm happy to have this little house, and I'm not ungrateful about it, and I smile at the ways in which it all fell together perfectly, in all the ways I needed. This house is a blessing, and what it represents for me - stability, privacy, return to autonomy, regaining a measure of control - are a balm.
But the walls can whisper, and something about sitting on one's couch at ten o'clock at night, and glancing into a corner of the living room, and seeing the way a yellow lightbulb catches a shadow against each ripple or sag or unevenness which lend so much charm to an older house with character in the bright sunlight of huge, antique windows - ten o'clock at night is an uneasy time in the literal light and shadow of so much shift.
Every day, I am grateful to have more than what I need. I've lost so much, and I have so much, but none of what I'm so lucky to have soothes the loss. And I miss.
I miss myself.
I miss so much when I didn't have to defend. Constantly defend. Disregard every dismissal that screams to life before I publish one single word. I miss myself when vulnerability wasn't a stupid, stupid luxury. Part of me wants to find my way back to times when I didn't have to scream a broken heart in hopes of being heard or believed; all of me wants to return to times before I gave up screaming. Part of me wants no part in vulnerability, ever again. But I'm going to die without it. Drama drama drama, you read; but really, no.
And I miss having felt a sense of home. I wish to feel like not a vagabond in this little house, in whose walls I confide I wonder how long you'll be mine as I make myself hang curtains and choose wall colors and take deep breaths, in whose walls I shut out numbness with projects, and sadness with loud media, against whose walls fear still kicks and breaks, outside of whose walls I navigate grocery stores and other humans, none of whom I know, all of which are just too big anymore.
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I miss being with people who know me, the people who have developed sense enough of my unseen that whatever air I breathe carries the fragrance of their presence; maybe this is what they mean when they say home is wherever you find yourself, but these fleeting intuitions of sanctuary, which were once a balm in bleak times, swell and echo in static silence as they return a call to home in a language I no longer speak, a call whose sounds I know, but the words of which I can't return; a dead language.
I fear that who I am now is rejected by those who knew me before, from my deepest roots - embryonic, raw-nerve earthen anchor - to the sunlit tips of my experience, to the ways in which I will lean into the sun, before. Always before. I crave to huddle under the cedars of Lebanon whose boughs stretch holyward and tower over their younglings, but I don't know if my now - in which nothing I knew before remains intact, in which all I know of God is you're there and I don't know what I believe of you and I'm furious and I will not shrink from any single question I scream at you - is labeled, garden-row-style, as rebellious or okay or arrogant or hurry-it-along or let-it-linger. If I am a prodigal, I need sleep so badly.
I miss moving under the holy gaze of people who look into others’ eyes and seek to know outside their own experiences.
I miss the air Who knows me in a place that is not Florida, all uprooted and arrogant in the way of surface-pretty with no substance, sharp versions grass suspending the walker above young, misplaced earth that knows neither how to sustain nor embalm. I miss a nuanced sun that lingers too long at summer’s end, the way it feels filtered on the skin by the patience of trees, and the wisdom of soil that has been ancient for ten thousand years.
I miss the presence of the female Divine in the cycle of seasons. I miss salted ice and a pale sun waiting behind the filigreed, bride-attendant billows of winter cloud; I miss the hills tumbling for miles and miles with no break of humanity; I miss the springtime ripening of sweet earth and her delicate, girlish promissory fragrance of life; later, I miss the heavy, honeyed musk of a thousand slain gardens after birth, at harvest, and the satisfied exhaustion of impending slumber, after which it all begins anew. I miss the astonishment of vibrant, God-breathed physical life bigger than myself. I miss not palm trees.
I miss the safety of places that exist as fully inside my skin as outside, and I am tired of evergreen violence that knows no season; I am tired of crimes against sleep and memory, and of the wounds and grief indigenous to this place, and I am tired of being required to consecrate them with the dignity of my attention. I am tired of the fight against that which will never, ever, ever be content to stay outside the contested borders of my bloodstream. I am tired that, at one time, I could not speak my life at full voice; I am exhausted that, now that I could speak, if I chose, I can't find the language that would explode from me, if I knew it.
The sonorous paths of grief, love, joy, anger, pain – in satisfaction, or phantom pain for that which is lost, or vindication, or reacquaintance with grief at levels yet to be awakened, or the womanly seasons of the world: they defy the human intention toward the ease of straight lines. Everything comes back around, eventually. Everything, to be navigated in curvature and intersection, each time to change the color of the world a bit and refresh one's sense of astonishment, for better or worse, til death.
I ache for a return to the familiar colors of my life, which shall be new; I am ready for acres of astonishment.
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