She argues with the blurry reflection of time. Where are the stories of essential suffering? Those hardships reside behind her fanciful illusions that she dresses up in imagined details. She blindfolds the departure moments of realizing that a book of myths might not actually give her the answers she seeks. With Post-its and highlighters she references the questions that apply to millennia. She annotates the histories of the gods and the heroes. She pulls the tools of her own deception from her ingrained mechanisms of faith and hope. She then decides these pages are fiction, but the bindings are her own. These inscriptions of births and deaths and wars in her great-grandmother’s Bible should be a warning, not an answer.
The characters of her own family whisper along beside her that it’s ok to take off her shoes, wade into the delicate and icy streams of generational trauma, and step carefully among the slippery rocks and over the downed tree that creates a crumbling bridge.
This is not her land. A man she’s never actually met owns the barbed-wire fence that she pulls apart to climb through. He owns the separations of cows that stare at her in blank acknowledgment. He owns the worn path in the grass toward the dense woods. But she focuses on the sunshine and feels the appeal of exhaustion that comes with a summer day spent exploring through the joys and sorrows of growth.
So she sheds her socks and finds the flattest entry point into the stream. Silkiness presses between her toes at the broadest point of the gentle curvature of liquid movement. Her voice finds a sharp expression of piercing answers. Evolution of self requires trespassing where some people say she shouldn’t go.
If we truly are destined for generations and created within the wombs of our grandmothers, then the damage done to them is done to us. That small stone of harm, whether thrown or said, crushes not only her footing, but also ours. And where does that line of ancestry decide to forfeit against the days of lingering? Surely years have softened the edges, but the stone lives within the stream, and there will be a day when a collection of stones will weigh her down and direct the geological impressions of dust.
No one really asks to dive into the center of your problems.
There is no midnight flame of healing with explorers following.
Under the forest. Beneath the rocks. Above the sky.
The search will be nowhere if you don’t embark on the journey yourself.
Darkened resemblances of our natural inclination to behold
the murmurs that haunt us.
I reach my hand into an unconquered flame that reflects in
Streams of my consciousness.
A sliver of a fish slides through my fingers.
So I pull a smooth stone from the mud of generations and polish it with the clear current.
The shades of its depth change as the evaporation bridges the stone to this external world.
In my pocket, I will carry it — both the stone and the world — and remember the stream lurking in the forest of my fears.
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