Here it is.

Younger me, you are dead. But your death has not been in vain. The me who emerged is stronger for the both of us. The me today knows that healing comes from pain and growth comes from healing. I stand here today knowed in gratitude for what your death has born in me.

That trust wasn’t a mistake, I had finally found truth in the universe, one that held me up through my drowning bouts. I had trusted and lost before, I didn’t trust myself nor anyone around me but this time I listened to a quiet voice, not masked by fear nor anguish, a voice so clear not masked by the past nor future expectations, there was a voice within me that spoke with such clarity I recognized it as my own.

It took so much from me. It took my sense of self, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Was I the girl that did all the wrong things good girls don’t do?  Could I even trust myself anymore? Do I reconcile the fact that all my actions and decisions landed me in that unlucky place? It took my sense of trust in the world. A world that wounded me and left me to die. A world that inflicted pain upon me in my dire state of neglect from the shame. A world that was not there to protect me when it happened, a world that blamed me into solitude.

This coming year, along with the peace and love I have jarred for the comfort of my soul, I also bring my voice. These pages a megaphone screaming my arrival. No longer will I be silenced. This year will be the year of a reckoning, truth telling and healing for me, healing for all around me. I will be a one woman riot.

I can’t keep quiet.

I struggle through the racing thoughts in my mind I can’t quiet down. I pick up the phone and think through the names I could dial. None of them seem like I should bother. Everyone has their own shit going on, businesses to run, children to run after, illnesses running their course. My racing brain that’s about to explode is not worthy of their precious time.

I needed him so very much to feel at home, I needed him to be where I could feel safe in his shield. He was my love, he was my home but sometimes like in this episode, his touch repelled me, like a million ants on my skin, like nails to the chalkboard.

I just saw the lines, I knew where my pencil should strike, I felt every bit of it, as fluent as I could scribe, my hand was drawing. I kept at it, I did not eat, I did not stop till I was somewhat satisfied.

We were here because my selfish ass thought to be depressed and spent the last few months living in autopilot, watching in aerial view as my body performed all the basic motherly tasks, bathing the children, feeding them, the worst of this all were the kisses I gave my husband but craved at the same time because I wasn’t in the shell that pressed the lips that were mine on his.

The cold Kentucky winter in the middle of this pandemic sends chills down my bones from a temporary separation from our village. The longing I feel is no longer for my home country, I crave the smiles of my friends, the shrill shrieks and screams of their children in my home, the sweet hugs and smiles of our friends at the stores.

I lay my face on the ground to feel the cold, to feel something that told me I was home. That told me I was safe. I was grounding. I spent the next few days grounding several times a day. The smell of my memory had lodged itself in my nostrils, refusing to be washed out no matter what I tried.

The most beautiful thing is how she makes me feel that allows me to lean on her with all my pain, most days she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She stays on the phone with me for three hours straight because she knows I need her. She has never made me feel anything but loved, she is my safe place.

The pitter patter of the raindrops, so rhythmic to my soul, it gives a kind of deep comfort that can only be gotten from it, the beautiful droplets that would plop onto the glass window then slide down with so much grace.

The shame has left me, the constraints within which I was forced to live within has disappeared into the fibers of these pages. I am writing about it because I am no longer a slave to the construct of life that tells me I am to be in hiding for shame. The shame has left. I am no longer in hiding.

The conversations go on but now I found myself ascending, leaving my body, my physical self went numb, stupid grin and nod plastered on my head. Does she like us? Did I just embarrass myself? Did I say something stupid? Why did I say that? Should have just shut up!Shouldn’t have served up the whole bar!

I waited for him to get home every evening and picked out the Celtic CD to play and we would listen to a whole album, eyes closed, together in our dome, my daddy and me. I learned about calm and peace in meditation.

I am often alone. I feel alone in a house of joyful screams and giggles, and night time conversations with my love. I feel alone in a world of phone calls from friends just catching up, in a world where I am greeted by smiling faces and conversations with people at stores. I often find myself alone.

Ok, then there was the issue of my accent, that wasn’t the first time I had heard that here in Kentucky. “I’m sorry, can’t understand you, it’s that accent” they would say. As humiliating and demeaning as that may be, when in Rome right?

I lined up every episode of Reba and mouthed along as she spoke. It was my ‘Murican ‘lessons’.

How much of us are we to give before it diminishes all of that is our self? I decided not to work to give all my time to mothering, but holy cow, time does not equal me. It seems as though that time, like the definite shell of a car, is restricted to its quantity, but me, it seems is forced into rapid perpetual regeneration that though it tears my skin, it keeps stretching. My service defies time.

I was having anxiety over my anxiety. This fucken Barracuda rears its head more often than I care to consider, yet it is the center of my world. Worrying about when bipolar will hit in any which direction was a constant, consistent, persistent obsession and fear of mine.

I looked around inspecting carefully though there was no possible way the monster would be here. It was almost twenty years ago and I am a million miles away from where it happened. He wasn’t here. My mind was playing a cruel trick on me again. I calmed myself and brought the girls inside.