one year — from there to here.
from there. from there on the couch. where i would wake at three a.m. one ordinary saturday morning, out of my doze to find my partner, then. dead on the floor, not yet forty years old.
a cruel trick of the fates, i’d find myself living another version of my own origin story as a motherless child, this time in the role of the father who would eventually become my Hook. but that isn’t what this is about.
thoughts ruminating as the year approached. on what to write. what to say. marveling at the distance yet not wanting to relive, rehash, revisit the depths to which i’d sunk into the trauma. upon trauma. upon trauma.
out of which i’d crawled, my fingertips & nails bloodied from holding on and slipping away again into the haze and the misery, moments of courage amongst swigs upon swigs of drink, amongst ideation – edgar only giving me pause, weeks upon weeks of therapy, individual and group – the metaphoric bloodletting of grief.
and then the turn, the turn, the turn of the new year out of the haze – the literal leaving behind.
i can’t recall when it was that i bought the three prints from them. photographs for sale for grad school supplies. three for thirty bucks. i’d finally framed them years later. she and i stood beneath them together as i shared with her who the artist was, never imagining as i stood with my arms around her shoulder so abrupt an end to her story, never imagining who the artist would become to me.
to here. those first tentative steps back into life.
to here. the end of the rainbow behind the House.
to here. captured moments laid upon my floor, two hands upon each of my shoulders, one made of stardust and one made of lost boi. each of their words, one past, one now, urging me through the door.
to here. another flight taken, another door opened.
to here. sitting upon their couch as i write this, three sixty five plus seventeen, into this dream of a life unfolding out from the endless Sea.
i’ve let the wind she’s become carry me on to the next part of the story / once it used to embrace me / now it has set me free.