twenty-five years worth of flowers

i lost my calendar,
so last January has been replaced by That January.

a near miss missile, a dry cough, the eerie groans of the person dying next to me, and the ancestral knowledge of how to drive on a freeway in a whiteout snowstorm that never leaves you,
That four-year-long January.

it might be that all Januaries will be That One from now on,
just like all Octobers are that moment, miles from anywhere,
when nothing existed but fear and delight and utter solitude (except for bears),
and all Mays will be my delirious brother with his head in the snow,
trying to wet his hair so it won't stick up all weird in the engagement photos.

how much more do i have to let go?
is there really enough of me left to fill a life?

i wonder if it's always this way,
that the more you know yourself,
the farther in you sink from the skin you wear,
the more alone you feel.

i'm spelunking, i told them.

i remembered, this year, the baby.
the baby screamed and screamed and no one answered because they were too tired and this wasn't what they signed up for.
i think,
actually,
you don't neglect a baby.
you don't, but they did,
and when i realized i never need to forgive them for that i felt the weight of that baby lift off my heart,
light and laughing,
as naturally as if he had always been that way.

this year i remembered the swing set and the lilac bush and plucking fifty newly-dead chickens on labor day and felt the ice set in.
it wasn't fear anymore by then,
because the word 'fear' is too small to contain what i was forced to be,
no by then it was utter certainty that safety was as real as Santa Claus and Jesus,
that 'relationship' was control and lies and manipulation in fancy clothes,
that the only things i could trust in this world were my brother and the small smooth-worn stories in my head that i spun like quarters on a table,
and as long as they kept spinning i would make it.

i had never used the word abuse, before,
but then i saw the shards of my own bitter rage in someone else,
heard someone else's mouth say
'don't ask me to do that, because i won't be able to tell you no',
saw a man like me call himself a survivor in front of a million people with only the barest hesitation,
and i was sick with horror and buoyant with relief.
i had never used the word survivor, before.

now every time i say it out loud (survivor, survivor, i made it, i lived)
i can feel the winch that's held in my guts for the past twenty-something years start to creak.
another deep belly breath, another sheered-off rusty metal tooth.

i'm not alone,
i keep repeating to myself,
trying to focus long enough to answer an email.
i'm not alone.
none of us are.
he said it, and i want to believe it, and maybe that's enough to make it true.

the concrete ramp will be gone soon.
the east coast hymnal and olives and lost marbles too.
the person i was before i knew me is now behind me, waiting for me to pick up where he left off.
sometimes the people who love you are the ones keeping you the same.
sometimes those people are also you.
the misty morning coffee orange chair raccoon family is gone (as big as dogs),
and the curtain and the mats,
and oh that thing i least wanted to lose, the teeth and the cane and the fire and the ghosts of all of us in a room that was too small to hold the life we were about to live.

but some things are the same (and not the same).
i know how dark it can get, so dark the only thing left is to trust the hands and knees that have crawled me out of this place before,
but this time i know how red the leaves get in fall,
and how some moments grow quiet just so you can hear the little click between them and you.
i still walk too softly,
but now i know i am more than that,
so much more than any of the things people praise me for.
praise me for who i am,
not for the pretty flowers i bloomed out of blows and tears and terror.
praise me for who i am, and then let me know who that is, because sometimes i think those flowers are all i have.

i'm more than that, he said.

i'm spelunking, i told them.

i lay the flowers on the ground outside, softly, because they are also precious.
you don't have to follow, but you might as well try to stop the world from spinning.
even down here, the water follows the tides.
my bones are rock, dissolving into sand, into rock, into sand.
each 'no' a glorious pale mushroom,
each pleasure a lichen spreading, creeping,
each loud footstep a deafening crack as i shift and split with the movement of the earth,
and each real 'yes' a whiplash movement, a glowing eye, a shiver, scales against ankle.

don't tell me i'm beautiful or smart or strong or resilient,
although i am,
because those are resting on the ground outside this place.

tell me i've changed like the boulder crumbles under ivy,
like waves and Januaries, lapping and overlapping myself again and again.
rejoice with me at the rot, because rot is something being set free.

flowers are the gifts i grew for other people for all those long years.
my ugliness is the gift i receive, reaching out, delighted, grateful beyond all imagining to have met myself at last.