In the shower the water rushes over my shoulders as it did earlier, when I sat in the bowl of a small waterfall and let the chill gush take my breath away.
In the river, I crawled like a creature; I enticed my lover as a fairy might, arranging my body in pools of sunlight that turned the flat pebbles to gold beneath the glassy running water; in the river, I pressed my hands into the unyielding face of the massive boulder over which the falls poured, feeling it press back against my palms. I release what no longer serves me, I whispered silently to the river, to the rocks. I let go, let it be taken from my heart and washed downstream. I do not chase, I attract, I fervently intoned with my eyes and lips sealed shut, my hands submerged in water up to the wrists. What is mine simply finds me. I sucked the green light from all around me, filling the space I created. I said thank you, the exhalation of my breath the gift I returned to the earth, the piercing gratitude made voluptuously bittersweet by awareness of the temporal, the mortal, the flow. I opened my eyes and saw my lover shining in the sun with water dripping from their dark curls, eyes bright.
In the shower I exhale short breaths out of my nose, from the diaphragm, as I find myself in rapid succession existing in different scenes from my childhood, my hands before me as they were in the river, looking out from within myself on the back porch during a summer thunderstorm, in the long closet looking for a boardgame, playing with the crocheted nativity set, hunting around for forgotten treasures in the empty church balcony while my mother played the organ, and on and on and on, I am hurtling through time and space at unimaginable speeds, I am everywhere at once. The part of me that is able to watch this happen is telling me You’re here now baby, and I’m here, I’ve got you, I look out for you, I protect you.
You are safe with me.
I can hardly fit around the size of the pain that is moving in waves through me, emanating from under my heart, some shadowy chasm of my being releasing monsters that had been afraid to go home, where it is light. I feel my chest get bigger, hollowing, my mouth gets wider, rounder, than it could physically be, as this pain pushes out of me. I am a birth canal for this emotion. There is only me, and this energy. I surrender to it. You’re doing so much better, I tell myself, the part of me that can watch and soothe and croon to the part of me that is being forcefully obliterated and the part of me that has to let it happen. You didn’t hurt yourself. You didn’t destroy your relationship. You didn’t try to escape this. And then bam, just as urgently I am flickering in all the times when I didn’t know it was ok to feel this, when I did run, when I did hurt others, when I hurt myself so badly without knowing why. The pain redoubles, the pain of all those young women I used to be, and presently am, sending their suffering screaming through the wormhole that has opened up in me, to be birthed out of my impossibly opened mouth in a heavy breath, a soft moan, their tears flooding from me in a ceaseless outpouring. And so the part of me that watches reassures all those ones of me too: now, you are here. I am with you.
As I wash my body and let my focus ride my hands, bringing myself into myself, I make a silent, broken-open apology to all the people I blamed for my lovelessness, those I tried to get close to when I was simply too afraid. Everyone I hurt when I knew love as something dangerous and painful, when I unconsciously believed that I would be hurt by those who claimed to love me. Desperately clinging to the beauty that I intuitively knew love to be, while at the very same time diving headlong in the other direction, running for my life. The pictures I painted for those who sought to love me, images of a paradise of love that I believed in my heart to be true but lost in the threat of someone drawing too near. All those castles in the air, which in the end I couldn’t claim. I release this pain, which no longer serves me, I open my heart to what is mine. The river rushes through me, answering the prayers of the afternoon. I examine the scope of my years of searching, of striving to understand.
I strive to understand.
Queen of Elves 