Drowning

February 9, 2017

I’ve been quiet, quiet, quiet…careful, careful, careful.
The shadows have grown in the silence. I’ve had to pull myself out, dirt in nails, water in lungs. 

Sorrow, depression, grief, trauma, despair, shifting realities, fantasies, dreams, nightmares—they’ve slid in and out, rising the waters that lap on the shore next to me, so close.
But the shore is a cliff separated by an abyss.

I was loved, I was loved, I was loved…but I was sinking, drowning, drowning, and no one could put a hand across the abyss to save.

What happens so rhythmically and perfectly to the tune of an unseen orchestra is that you separate, slowly, carefully, quietly, so the fewest, the fewest can hear you struggle to breathe.

You are a memory, a painting they once saw, a lead character that slowly faded to supporting—to side—to extra—to a color in a corner—blink, it is grey. 

My children left. Not in drips, but in a flood. The 18 years of not identity, but reality—washed…

I was a mother, through cancers and divorce and marriage and change. I was a mother, I was their mother, I was their home. Still a mother but not a home. Home was suddenly shifting plains of wet sand that once had been something. Gone, gone, gone, in a moment, in a car ride, it was gone.

Though I’d spent months helping, researching, editing, supporting their dreams of flight, I did not prepare. I grasped and feasted on their presence, tried to gorge myself on the last moments of the beauty that was their childhood. I tried to prepare for the emptiness, for the starvation, by overfilling. I’d call myself a fool, but nothing could prepare.

One has returned, wounded. Wounded, the one I was most ready to watch soar, wounded, her mottled wings under are fragile. I couldn’t see the small matted down belying her age as much younger. Wings born fragile, soft, scarred, wounds unhealed gathering up in an illusion, a mirage of a wing. "Fly, fly," I shouted and threw her from the highest tree. When she faltered, I knew what to do, I yelled “fly! fly!” louder, the hoarseness of my voice, pushing her further, further, further…she seemed to smile, she seemed to smile, right before she floated into claws. 

Can you tape her wings? Can you mend her bones? Can you clear her eyes? Can you teach her how to pause for the refrain? Can you teach her to sit in the silence? To stop the dilations? To hear without an echo, her heart? To quiet, to make her careful, like me.

I love her, I love her, I love her, but I don’t know how to save her, how to reach my hand across the abyss. 

I had 18 years…I didn’t understand there was a ticking clock, as my vigilance wore down, as my energy sapped. As I stopped too often and let someone else pick up her refrain. I was distracted by wisps of light, leaping at a glimpse of the thinnest glimmering ray— that it would be okay, it would be okay. It was ticking, it was ticking, but I was sleeping through all the alarms.

You have 18 years to save them, then you have to stand on the shore—reaching, pointing, praying, watching the heartbreaking dance of their struggle that mimes itself inside you, but renders you helpless, frozen, shredded.

Sometimes in the dark, submerging waters, hands are roots—you have to remember how to kick. You have to remember how to breathe. You have to remember how to save yourself. And if you never knew how, you have to learn. I’m remembering, as she learns. Dirt in nails, water in lungs, I am remembering.