If you untangle the threads of your being, with what stories do they hum?
For me: fish underfoot in the James. Honeysuckle, bumble bees, bows and arrows. Being a pawn in a game I was too young to understand. Driving without purpose in search of direction, spilling my heart to a pickup truck. Years of feeling too deeply or nothing at all, unsure of which is better. The complexity of being both sister and mother, child and adult, dependent and independent. Deep, aching loneliness followed swiftly by incandescent, radiant belonging. Oil-stained jeans and grease-smeared hands asserting their place in the monument of academia. Feeling my body become a stranger, then letting her welcome me back home.
Now, embracing freedom in a body I’ve been taught is anything but limitless. My life hums with the beginnings of true self-love and a long-awaited appreciation for my worth.
I am threads of stories wrapped around a heart unwilling to feel in fractions, incapable of being anything less than its full self.
I am arriving.