6 Months
...and three nights
I’ve spent the past 6 months screaming into the abyss. At least inside my own head. Or screaming, skyclad and with roiling thunder booms of belly laughs that are the only things to touch my soul lately.
I go to the grocery store and am screaming inside my skull. At the mundane. At the people who do not know the depths of my grief. They did not lose you.
My throat, carved raw and bleeding. What honey will soothe the jagged slices I’ve made while howling in pain. What warm liquid will melt the ice dams that cover the entirety of the deep winter river that is my throat. There is nothing in this store for me. I leave empty most of the time and haul the necessities of living, of keeping my family fed, into the car.
How do I survive without you.
How do I transmute the mundane living and the Celestial being that is yours? How do I hold the ground and the sky and the sweeping energy contained within. I cannot stop. I can’t begin. I cannot. I can’t NOT.
This space. This spot. This dime.
I scream into the grief that is mine alone. My own shell, the shape that holds me. The carcass of a being. A loving being. I am alive. And I am dead. My kids keep me afloat on the river. But it rages. I am both above and below the surface. All of the time. I struggle to hold both truths until I let go of the binary. I struggle regardless.
I struggle the ground. I struggle the air. I struggle. I struggle.
My family tolerates. They struggle. Especially my husband. He does not know me depthless. He knows the edges I have given him. But with this, I cannot. And so I evade. I walk back. I hide. And I am sorry. Sorrowful. Sad.
I have too many griefs for him. For this. For the love I told him we would have. For what I owe him for his sacrifice. For the making of mother. Fuck it’s all way too loud and too much and easy was a path we left many, many years ago. And for that I am grievously sad. The bottom of my soul aches. I howl and I am not sated. Or full or empty. I am not heard. This grief is mine, and mine alone. No matter the tone or volume or cacophony of my howl to the most steady moon. This grief is mine.
The descent then.
The thrum as I lay my ear to the earth humbles me every time. To lower my whole self down, to flatten out and stretch, as close to the mother as I can. The inhale and long exhale, gravity supporting the lowering. The deflation. The smallest space I can be without being under the dirt.
I make room for the thrum in my ears. The pulse of the night, running through my veins. The ripe peach fuzz the only thing between us, a whisper of a crushed blade of grass wedged between my bones and the ground.
I collapse my spine further, sinking, sinking. Surrender. The Descent.
I spend 3 nights with Lilith at my back. Lacing a red satin ribbon up my spine. Into each vertebrae, firm and sure. She secured each…
tug
tug
tug,
…like she was lacing up an intricate corset. I swear I can hear her humming. But no words, no eye contact.
Her hands on me, me letting her in. Shifting my body to allow the work to be done. Each time I wake, I will myself back to her hands. I push my body deeper towards the ground. I dream in shades of crimson and blood. I give myself to the descent.
I can’t but not.
The red road, Lilith’s Red Road, inside of me, part of me, woven into me. A warrior braid, the völva, women as a tribe, women readying for the battle, showing true strength and beauty. It is ASTONISHING. To be seen as this. To be given this vision. My truest self. Only seen here in the dark. Only if I give in to the descent.