The dregs of anxiety have begun to recede and aren’t hanging their angry fingers over my head every day. At last. Although my palms sweat again just writing about it. It’s manageable, as if my body just had to take a few weeks to recognize it for what it was and relax again. CBD oils are helping quite a lot, and my nights are full of vivid dreams of moments when I look down at my hands to see they’re covered in blooming vines and blood and vibrant living things.
Every morning now I get up earlier than I had before to fit in almost an hour of walking outside, no matter the weather. I find that on the days I don’t do this by the evenings I’m overwhelmed again and shivering shaking sweating beads of sourness that I can’t escape from. The walking helps lubricate my joints and my mind at the same time, and I won’t be stopping the new habit anytime soon. It’s helped my appetite return as well, and I find myself with a gurgling in my stomach that isn’t fear or dread but a powerful hunger, something I haven’t felt in what feels like quite a long time.
I’m more sensitive to the things I put into my body now…or perhaps I always was and just masked it with alcohol or green. I’m sober from alcohol two years and six months almost to the day, and I don’t miss it one bit. Seeing people drink on shows and films makes my body revolt and I wonder how I did that so long. Perhaps it was a seventeen-year-long-phase I simply had to go through. The genetic tendency is strong within my bloodline, I didn’t realize what a problem I had until it was too late, and I tried to kill my mind and body with alcohol until they simply rebelled and had enough. I’m thankful for this and hope that it stays that way for the rest of my life. If I drank again it would kill me, I know it as sure as gravity, inescapable and with a will of its own.
It’s spring break here in Texas, although the damp cold of the last freeze seems to linger in the ground the sun is making up for lost time. On walks there are heaps of cacti and agave that didn’t make it, piled against the curb for the rubbish, breaking my heart with their wilted faded yellows and pale greens. Their tissue is spongy as if the ice that formed in their cell walls turned them to mush barely contained by their skins. The barbs and needles are still as spiky as ever, though, as they don’t have living tissue inside them, and I’ve pricked my fingers more than once as I pass by and say hello.
There’s a live oak on my street I want to draw. She’s ancient, hundreds of years old, we don’t have many trees like that in this area. Her center is hollow, dead wood rotted away, but she still lives and throws acorns that make saplings. I’m convinced the oak in my front yard, the one I wrapped myself around to anchor my mind during the ice storms, is a descendant of this ancient one, and I want to remember her.
If I come back after this life let it be as a tree.
Kiddo and I have spent our extra spring break days together with the windows open as I’ve worked, soaking in the sunshine and fresh air (and oak pollen, it’s that time of year again). Yesterday he sat in here with me as I worked, gaming on his laptop building Serenity (from Firefly) from scratch in Roblox. We chatted and laughed and it was glorious. After the shift was over I made chicken and broccoli and we stuffed ourselves as we watched Zack Snyder’s Justice League then cuddled afterwards until I started to fall asleep. He has this curiously sweet way of curling my arm against the top of his chest, across his clavicles, to where my hand rests on his shoulder, and he tucks his chin into my arm, trapping it against him. I don’t mind this in the least and would sit there letting him hold my arm for years if he wanted to. His heart is so purely sweet and he’s an ache inside him I can’t define or reach yet, but I know I was the one to put it there when I left his father. And when I moved to Idaho with my Stardust, even though it broke me in ways nothing ever has to leave her, I had to come back to him. Nothing will make me leave him again.
This vividly delicious rush of elation…I hope it stays. My tears today are from joy and relief instead of fear and anger, and I welcome them when he’s not there to watch me. I can’t cry in front of him, he’s too much an empath and he worries over me so. He has since he was small, seeing his father with my best friend, and me alone. I am grateful he can now see me whole without someone to pair up with. I hope he takes that lesson into adulthood. I didn’t know that it was acceptable to be single when I was a child. The only examples growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness was one miserably unhappy divorced woman in the congregation, and another who never found a partner, though she wanted one and looked incessantly all the years I grew up. I thought it was necessary to be paired. Not to have kids, as that was highly discouraged and still is in the JW way of thinking, but to be paired was necessary. It was how a person stayed faithful to their god, by way of controlling their natural impulses to pair and mate. With a married partner you could indulge your physical desires and still be faithful. Even if you were unhappily paired.
For years I felt that I needed it too, until I left the marriage. Then paired and broke up then paired again over the next decade, with breaks in-between each. I suppose it was necessary to me, too, then. To have an outlet. I don’t feel it anymore. That died within me when I left my Stardust and I’m happier now than I have ever been, alone as I should have always done.
It’s long enough that he’s worried for me. My mission now is to show him there’s no reason to.
Life. Is. Glorious. And I intend to sup on the marrow and suck the bones and wear them around my throat, smiling a toothy grin of satisfaction the rest of my days.
A Burd in Flight 