The wind in my storm

I believe this world will be saved by women.  Not perfected, not sanctioned, 

Not radicalized… Saved.  

Saved by soft women. 

Saved by mindful women. 

Saved by sensual women.  

All guiding in the direction of contentment. Simple lucid contentment. 

Saved by women guiding in the direction of communal care.  

A Reverent communion of space holding.

Of energetic rooting and rearing exalt.   

In youth, I understood that I was seen as small in my womanhood.  

I understood that my safety, my peace, that my very survival came down to a simple transaction.  

An ideal that I purchased daily by acting sweet and staying quiet.  

Even in my smallness, I knew that notion was futile to a woman like me.  

I had already taken a lover with the fire inside.  

I knew then, a shift would be coming…

And I believed I’d be here to see it.  

But, I believed it would come like a storm.   

A complete and violent shifting gale. 

And now, standing in the mid-life of my existence, I still wait for that great storm.  

Holding, unmoving in the dark, 

under a stared sky.  

I wait for the clouds to shift. 

I wait for the moon to darken.  

I wait for the thunder of a million defiant women.  

I wait to join them.  

I’ve cried for the pestilence that holds the tethers that bind us.  

Yet I smile knowing their ropes are braided with rot.  

But I am no longer willing to wait for the fibers to rip.  

In this meridian body, I feel my own shifting tide, and Im certain these mid-lifed organs have room yet to make.

More room to love.  

I will not endure my own confinements, nor these societal fits.  

I will endure with rest.  

I will move with elegant passion.  

I will be guided towards love, by holding space, to allow my interactions to slow.

By losing time with those who seek to be touched by the vitality of this life and of the sacredness of this death. 

I will endure as a season.  

I will change, 

I will grow, 

I will warm these aging bones in the sunlight, and then, 

I will winter…

I will be touched by all things, 

And I will move towards love with intention. 

I may not see the whole of the world shift, but I will see the shift within 

the world around me.  

And perhaps that, in its part,

just like the wind shifts the storm, 

is all the world I am meant to see.  

Wind can be gentle, 

and wind can be deafening.  

Wind touches everything

This Skin… 

A testament to loss.

A dichotomy of love, of failure, and change.  The visceral way a spoon scrapes the cooled film on top of tomato soup, my arms crease and fold the same.  

In this loose skin, the ghosts still remain.

This Body…

A testament to time.

In its fullness, never searched for home.  Deliriously playful and childlike in the way it was endlessly loved.  This body formed mountains, with soft ground and tall grass.  This body swayed.  This body served.  This body touched the sides of life.

But, did I over live?  Did I stretch my body thin?  Was it tradition?  Was it the indulgence of my youth?

Could I hold this body together?

This Loss…

A testament to impermanence.

Now deflated and hollowed and partially disembodied.

Do I only love half my flesh?  Should I only care for the parts that stayed strong?  While these soft mountains turn to crags.  The tall grass, now lichens clinging to rocks.  Muscle, swelling like an ocean.  Do I still live in the seasons of this body?

Is it natural?

This Pain…

A testament to transcendence.

This pain is important.  How I succumb to it and how I move in it.

Is truth always serenaded by change?

I have no traditions to pass, only legacy, and in time,  it will transcend this plane too.

Can I find myself in the ripples?  Can I accept these gifts of loss?

Can I enjoy the view?

This New Skin…

A testament to home.

The only home I have.  The home that’s carried my largeness and my smallness.  This haunted skin, I’ve never seen before, yet every inch, still memorized.  Loose memories of the past.  This sack that still holds all of the beauty and all of the darkness that is me.  These jetting crags.  These waterfalls of skin.  Loose cascades of skin.  This beautiful time capsule of love and tragedy and reshaping.

It lives in the folds.  It endures.

In This Loose Skin,

All the stories of my life.  Some of these stories are ending… and some are just beginning.

Still… It holds all the yesses of tomorrow.

She took in strays.  Mostly cats, but sometimes humans too.  She kept a large caged enclosure on the back side of her house for all the feral cats she found, and she fed them and kept them safe. After she lost the love of her life and burned her house down, the humane society scheduled a time to bring a van out to euthanize all the cats.   Many of them had been badly burned, others suffered from inhaling smoke.   The night before they came, she snuck back to her old burned black house, and opened all the cages and set all the cats free to live or die in their own fashion. After all, she did love them.   

Their love, it was devoted and friendly and free, and topped with all the passion their little bodies could handle.  And it was theirs.  No one could beat it, no one could touch it, because it was God.  It was simple and it was true and it was everything.  But we are all damned in this life. There’s no changing it.  Life will always be a losing battle.  So, when she found his body on the floor, eyes softly glazed to the ceiling, palms up and loose at his sides, his mouth dry and gaped, she knew there would never be another man that touched her soul the way he had touched hers.  No one would ever hold the same warmth and calm in her as he did.  

She laid down beside him on the floor.  His cold body could not receive her, everything familiar was now strange, too close and too far away at the same time.  Her favorite stray, the only one allowed in the house, who was aptly named Squid, after she rescued him from rising high tides under the portside dock, cautiously approached.  He gently sniffed the thick death filled air, before toeing just close enough to sniff her face, his cold wet nose cautiously tapping her cheek, before he quickly turned to retreat.  He scurried a few steps away and then paused mid step to look back at her face.  The first of many tears rolled down her cheek.  Squid turned and hastily left the scene to find a good hiding spot.  

After an hour, she finally peeled herself from the floor to call the authorities.  She opened the front door, but left the screen door shut, she wasn’t ready to let the entirety of the world in just yet.  She sat back on the floor, cradled his head and caressed his face, wishing it was still soft and supple to the touch.  Two police men and an emt entered their home quietly and reverently.  She did not look up and they did not say a word until they all stood around her; “good evening, ma’am”.   “His name is Hart.” She said calmly.  She thought about correcting herself and saying his name was Hart, but he was still there in her arms.  For the moment, he still was.   

One of the police officers coerced her to the other side of the room to begin asking all the necessary questions, but she never took her eyes off Hart.  The EMT agent stood in silence with her head bowed.  There was no assessing or saving to be done, there was no life left.  The second police officer, who was a very stout man, took hold of Hart’s hand and half lifted his body from the ground.  The image of his stiff body being moved jolted her to finally look away.  She closed her eyes tightly.  She was angry that this man had to lift Hart’s body to assert his level of deadness, but it was much too late to scream, much too late for anything to be any different.  

Shortly after, the coroner arrived, to take photographs and pronounce the body.  Then Hart was moved to a body bag and placed on a gurney and wheeled to a transport.  The police officer kept her busy while this was happening, which she later recognized as a method to get a nasty job done as quickly as possible while ardently avoiding a potential emotional scene.  She hated systems that compartmentalized heavy human shifts in reality.   Quickly and tidily moving through the ugly bits of life, so that all involved could find their pillow at night without the horror of life pounding on the door.  She was an oddly curious girl.  She preferred to let the horrors in.  She preferred to offer them tea and sit down for a chat.  

But no one can prepare you for the first moment you find yourself alone after finding the man you love dead on the floor.   She took a deep breath in and smelled the air.  Have you ever noticed how everyone you meet has a unique smell they alone possess?  We’re all used to our own smell.  We live with it looming around us every day and it just fades into the nothingness around us.   Until the day you fall in love.  Then soon you’re moving in together, and all of a sudden, one day you’re coming home from work and you swing open the door to your house and you realize you don’t smell like you anymore.  There’s a split second, maybe three, where you wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong house, because something so basically comfortable has left, and somehow you never noticed.  Now you have a whole new smell, one that’s not just your own anymore.   It can be unsettling if it’s not right.

Hart’s smell was always right.  Like clean laundry and kitchen spices and just a hint of marijuana.  She remembered early on when they were first dating, they spent a day at the laundry mat.  Hart showed her how he liked to fold his towels.  Everything inside her smiled when she realized it was the same way she also liked to fold her own towels.  She knew she was going to love him then.  She knew it would be one of those deep spooky loves that got deep down in your bones.  She pulled a towel down from the linen closet and turned on the shower.  She hated showers.  She found them impersonal.  She wanted to commune with her filth.  Have one last hurrah together before she sends it back to the sea.  But tonight, she would have drowned herself in that tub.  She thought it best to keep things impersonal.   

She wasn’t a girl anyone ever considered to be irrational.  She kept her sadness close to the chest.  She didn’t want to bother other people, and more truthfully, she couldn’t be bothered to deal with other people’s opinions and embodiment of her pain.  She was very lonely in that way.  She knew nothing was ever permanent, and nothing was ever final either.  But losing Hart felt pretty permanent and pretty final… and she felt a dark sense of freedom from it.   Like looking into an abyss.  She knew that nothing going forward would be familiar, and she knew that everything that ever truly mattered to her was now gone forever.  So, there was nothing left, except her own existence, and maybe Squid, and that was that.  

She sat on the toilet and dried her wet hair, and after stared down at the damp towel in her hands.  She took it to the dresser and folded it back into its perfect trifold shape, and put it back into the linen closet wet.  She held the door ajar and looked at all the towels so nicely folded and stacked.  Squid’s cat carrier sat at the bottom of the closet.  Hart came home from work one evening with a label maker and gleefully labeled many of the inanimate objects in the house, including Squid’s carrier.  She carefully pulled the carrier out of the closet and lined it with one of the dry towels.  She wrangled Squid into the carrier and packed a bag full of his fancy wet food and kibble and took him outside to the car parked along the street.  Quietly she said to Squid as she packed him in the car; “I will feed you love from a silver spoon, so that you may never feel the need to lick it off knives.”

When she returned to the house, she looked around at all the life her and Hart had built together, all the love they shared in that home.  She looked at the carpet where he had died.  She walked upstairs to their bedroom.  In a small ceramic bowl on the bedside table, she pulled out a necklace Hart had given her with a little moon pendant on it.   She removed her wedding ring and looped it on to the necklace and clasped it behind her neck.  She walked back down to the living room and looked at the carpet again.  She picked up the little ceramic cowboy boot full of matches she found at a thrift shop back in Houston, and couldn’t leave without.  It had a strip of striking paper on the bottom of the sole to light the matches on.  Hart paid for it solely because it brought her so much joy.  She pulled a match from the boot, struck it against the sole and held it to her face.  

What she stood for in this wild world was simple.  It was love.  Love that didn’t require ownership, but did require presence.  Love that allowed a person to stand firmly in the divinity of one’s self without the threat of degradation of character.  Without threat of leaving.  Love that didn’t expect a damn thing, except honor and kindness and a fuck ton of kissing.  And that’s it.  That’s the only thing in life that mattered. The rest was just simply variations of this.

She looked back one more time at the carpet, then back at the match, the flame now traveling down towards her fingers.  She laid the match down on the gray woven couch they bought at round top in 2004, and then she walked out the front door.