The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.
I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.
And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.
How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.
Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.
I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.
In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?
It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.
I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.
I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.
