When I hugged her there, it was the first time I’d really meant it. I wondered if she’d noticed. We walked to the farthest edge of the orchard, where the noise of the crowds was overtaken by the wind.
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I often think of the relationship between my younger brother and myself to be some strange symbiotic social experiment.
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The ocean calls me. I feel its wild call every morning when I rise. The anticipation of a new sunrise
awakens my soul and my body knows that I must get near the water.
I remember the first time someone told me that my body was too heavy.
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My desire for healing, my deep need for support helped writing sneak out and cradle me.
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For decades, I study my body in the mirror as though I am split in a literal sense.
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I’ve been highly observant since I was a little girl. “Did you hear that sound?”
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Part of making a home in your life is learning to understand the calls of your soul, learning to hear the small voice, to take time to care, to show regard. Learning to know which words are important, which lines are old narratives, which tapes to press stop on and which tapes to press play on.
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In solitude, I learned to sit with every emotion that surfaced.
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Distant, unlikely, preventative, in flux, ominous — once, there was an expiration date. Without it there was nothing to hold close. Numbness hit unexpectedly, so did that gift of tempting inaction. It was easy to fall into passivity and in a way, be still.
My truth telling began not as a bold and beautiful expose, but a secret and sacred pushing of Post-Its on the wall behind the clothes in my closet. I had just graduated with a Bachelor of Theology, finished reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and felt inspired by the fictional character, May Boatright’s creation of her very own Wailing Wall.
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It was as though her voice was calling forth the memories of walking down dirt roads in Kenya, skipping to school for miles with the taste of breakfast still on her tongue.
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I’m 8 in the dressing room at a JC Penney and none of the clothes fit me, I sink to the floor.
My mom knocks at the door and says “Honey let me see, I’m sure you look pretty,”
But I don’t have the strength to tell her that once more, the clothes didn’t fit my shape.
Cancer struck my life, checking names off its list like tally marks.
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Every week, without fail, her therapist would ask her the same questions, and again without fail, Emilia would sit there and avoid taking any actual steps towards a resolution. Not that she didn't want to get better, but the fear she had when she approached those memories, those feelings, was just too much. She preferred the isolation of separating herself from that which made her human.
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These days I don’t write poems anymore, and I feel a part of me is too comfortable hiding, too comfortable with the idea of getting lost in the shadows of a self who never was or never was entirely whole.
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I’ve been on the run for too long. Trying to escape from you and from the pain
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You see, in a past life
where I wore the same face, I died during childbirth. I remember
white gown, red blood stain of a life taken for another. I am not selfish,
My therapist says it’s important to stay tethered. I believe her.
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