If you have the ears to listen, you will find your story in the patterns made by shifting light, the whispers on the wind, the creaking of the branches on a stormy night.
Then
I constructed a life out of long walks, antique furniture, and checklists. Compromise and party hats. The faces of the chamomile flowers it took me two years to perfect, rising up with smiling faces to greet the summer sun. My roses did not bloom this year; I should have known then that love was dead. It was no surprise when it all collapsed in the heat of anger. His and mine. I was not surprised when the hand came out of nowhere to slap me and push me down. I already half believed the lies he shouted as I ran out of the door.
Grief comes in waves. A sea of sorrow that, even at a distance, echoes out loud. My checklists are different now. At first, they just read, “get out of bed, take a shower”. Then came the lists of Difficult Things. The conversations that nobody wanted to have. The fields I must say goodbye to, and the last pictures of the views I’d learned to love. The house that no longer feels like home, which must be emptied. More complicated still, the feelings I must unravel and patterns I must unlearn. The maze I must navigate of other people’s expectations – their to do lists. Their clocks are ticking; mine has stopped.
I must remember how to be alone now. Curate the way I fill this space. I must remember that I get to choose. I do not have to do anything, or be anything, anymore. I am learning to find myself in quiet moments. In the questions. I am consciously untangling what no longer belongs to me – dropping it off at Goodwill, along with the furniture around which we built that life. I practise embracing newness.
Now
I ran away to the woods this morning. Ran into the wind as the white edge of the light danced on the horizon, over the trees. I ran to where the bare limbs of branches trail their ivy like a bride’s train. I ran to where the only sound was the creaking of boughs and the hawking of a crow.
At dawn, the world is different. The old magic does not seem so far away when the light is peeling back night’s grey shroud, the colour creeping across the leaves and limbs and loam. Somewhere in the distance there comes a shriek like a rusty laugh. A bird. Just a bird. But I fumble at my neck for the iron on my chain. Call the dog back sharply. In these liminal places, the veil is thin.
I shuffle my feet through the wet leaves, now brown and sodden. I cross the stream where the claggy mud, more clay than earth, sucks at your boots and releases them reluctantly with the rasp of a dying breath. The air is still. Paused. The pause before the inhalation. Hold. Hold. Wait. We are free but we are waiting. Waiting. Waiting. For what? To be told that we are free?
If you have the ears to listen, you will find your story in the patterns made by shifting light, the whispers on the wind. Listen to the sound of the frost crunching beneath your bare feet, and it will tell you how to break. The sound of the owl on the night air, the petals of a snowdrop unfurling, these things will tell you how to mend.
