All the Other Pieces

 Remember before you were a wife, and before you were a mom, and before you were a widow raising three children alone?

Everything you were that had not yet been traumatized or taken?

You used to make things. 

You used to have many hours in which to make things. 

It was who you were.

Remember all the other pieces?

In college you consumed ideas of beauty and impermanence like they were your sustenance. It was the essence of what you were. You were in love with the world, with flowers and the way they bloomed, with the vastness of the night sky, with birds flying silently over abandoned buildings, and in the same moment you saw that beauty you were overwhelmed by it because you realized either it or you or both were impermanent. Your heart screamed when you saw beauty because you wanted to freeze it, to not let it go, or to not have it let go of you. And you tried to hold the fragility of beauty in your hands and you tried to deal with that feeling through the creation of objects.

Remember you had time to read? You worked at the library and after every shift you left with stacks and stacks of hard bound picture books, piled higher than your head and weighing more than your body. You carried them in your arms up the steep hill to the house you lived in. 

You studied the books, the pages, the objects of beauty that others created with a deep mix of joy and envy and you locked onto the words of the ghosts who had made them. You wrote the words down with an extra extra fine felt tip pen in thick, lineless sketchbooks, along with inky drawings of people and monsters. 

Your fingers used to be raw from the pricks of a needle. You ate popcorn every day for dinner so you could afford silk thread. You were mostly alone, in the big house where you lived by yourself, and slept by yourself in an ornate room with red velvet curtains, surrounded by objects that weren't yours but were yours to take care of for just a moment.

You had been hurt, and you were hurting. You loved the world deeply but you were also so afraid of it. You were afraid of the impermanence of things. Of people. Of love. And out of that feeling you made things.

Remember how you made objects that were about beauty, and the loss of love, and impermanence, even before you found his body hanging? 

Remember all the other pieces?

Out of college you had to get a job, and you worked and you ran for miles every day, because being breathless and having an exhausted, tiny body was the goal. You loved yourself the most when you were as small as possible, with a dizzy head and lungs that felt like they were on the verge of collapse. Almost dying was exhilarating and terrifying. 

Then you moved back home because you had loved deeply but that love had walked away from you (again). And again you picked up a needle and thread and a pencil and you made a series of ornate tiny self portraits in matchbooks. They were tiny and beautiful, like you wanted yourself to be. You wanted your work and yourself to take up as little space as possible, but to be stunning in that space taken.

Then you met him, and then you became a wife and pregnant in the same year, and all the love and fear that had gone into the pieces you made went into a man and then a baby. And then it went into another baby and then another baby. And your new purpose outgrew a need to make pieces. You had made tiny, stunning babies, and you needed to take care of them. Always. It was an always and every moment care.

And while you took care of your stunning little babies, you lost your mother who hadn't loved you the way you wished she had. You lost her permanently.

And while you took care of your stunning little babies, you lost parts of your body that had become dangerous, that threatened to take you away from all the beauty you loved and feared.

And while you took care of your stunning little babies, you found a body hanging in a basement, and everything changed and you understood what you had always understood. Nothing is permanent. Everything beautiful ends. You screamed this into the grass in your front yard and got dirt under your fingers and in your mouth and then you stood up, eventually, and with a broken face, you kept going.

You had a singular purpose: survive. keep the babies alive. 

You've done it well. 

You have survived. 

The babies are good and grown and loved.

But remember all the other pieces? They are in boxes in the basement. Notebooks full of tiny writing, bins full of pictures and words that used to feel like your purpose. They are buried like his ashes, in an urn, in a hole below the ground.

Maybe it is time to unearth all the other pieces. They are not dead like him. Maybe let them out, and let them breathe again and be part of your purpose. You understand beauty and impermanence with your whole heart. You always have. Maybe speak this with your hands.