you and I.

Someday, let's pack a picnic of cheese and chocolate and bread. Drink sparkling water like it was wine. Let's spend all our money on photo booths and get lost running in the streets. Buy hot sugared almonds and pick bouquets of wildflowers, leave a trail of petals to find ourselves by. Let's watch the stars and point out constellations for which we have no names.

And so, you get up.

by beautiful anda

Sometimes, life is heavy.

You don't notice it at first. It's like collecting stones. You start slowly, gently. At first, you can't feel the weight. Then it becomes harder to notice what's in front of you. You can't see the scope, the slope of the landscape, because you're focused on carrying the foundation. It's easier to shoulder it all and numb yourself to the weight.

But there's that place. That point where you read your threshold, your valley. Maybe you've walked for so long that you are bone weary and ringed with grief. Or perhaps you ran, the entire way, and your breath is knocked out of you. And you realize . . . you don't know where you are. Or more soberingly, how you arrived. You look back and see that you've missed the markers, missed the milestones, missed the moments. Too busy holding onto the heaviness of the journey. It's been like that for so long that you're afraid you won't know who you are without it.

You have to let it go. To not go apathetic. To not go numb. To not go quiet.

Don't let sorrow swallow your song. You need to be awake - to the world, to life, to yourself. It feels like running for the first time, like stretching your shuddering muscles, like walking in the cold dew of morning. It stings. You start in the dark, with only the promise of sun. There's no light to outline the path. It doesn't matter. You've forgotten the road anyways. You've walked so long without one that trails are unfamiliar and foreign.

There is no hiding from brokenness. There is no running from grief. Some manage to evade it for longer, others find it knocking on their door daily. She has a face you cannot forget, leaves her calling card everywhere she goes. We are each stitched with ribbons of our every heartache, except, some of us are frayed. Even the best of us have tears.

This living, breathing, being awake . . . this is painful. Sometimes, it feels easier, better, to go cold. To give into the pain and become numb, and once again, pick up the skeleton of who you were before grief marked your face. To let your heart harden. Lock it away and melt the key and live in the motions, never the moment. At the very point of pain, it seems less exhausting. But passivity is a silent slow killer, a lie that laps away at the texture of life like water on the stone.

And so, you get up.

You keep moving though your bones ache. You walk until you run. You hum until you can sing. You catalogue small things until you can once again take in the scope. You choose to be awake. It's surprisingly painful. It's sobering to look around and realize you have forgotten what it means to be alive, for so long, for so long. It's February and you're barefoot and the ground has still not thawed.

Breathe. Again. And again. Dive into the core and pressure point of your pain, the heart of your ache. It's red hot and white and bitter black. It shakes like starlight. You swallow it like stones. But you emerge and understand, it hasn't added a layer to your heart . . . but a ring. It's not a mark, but a message.

The thing about being awake is you notice things. Good. Bad. Beautiful. Painful. Sorrowing. Sweet. Bitter. Broken. Dizzying between everything. You cry more. You laugh deeper. You understand broken things and encourage flowers to just be. You find your soul sprouting little green things, that the roots of the marrow of being haven't left after all. And it's painful, the fire of wakening running like blood. You've been asleep for so long feeling is foreign.

But you begin to appreciate what is small. You begin to breathe gratitude. You stumble on meaning, find grace woven alongside ache. It's not easy. It's not quick. It's gradual, a journey. This time, instead of collecting stones, you're collecting colors of the sky. You jot down thanks and let them go wild in the plum breath of the evening. The smear of jam on toast, black coffee in the morning, a walk in the evening that lingers.

Look at the trees, how they burn. Look at the fields, how they deepen. Look at the world, how it cries.

It's a choice to go deep and live through your pain, to feel it all, to choose to be awake to what comes. Bravely, when the time beckons, to let it go. Knowing that the struggle and searching builds strength, story, a song. Only, you are alive and present and find the words to sing inside you, and they were, all along.

three sisters.

i. Grace.

When it rains, she collects water in
wooden bowls. Makes soup with
dandelion greens. Down the road,
a boysenberry tree stains the
neighborhood. She gathers the fruit,
barefoot. Her fingers remember
green things.

ii. Beauty.

Inside, she unties string, weaves straw
into gold. She plaits forgiveness into
her roots and drinks moon in her
mother's china. Her laughter
crystallizes the air. When she moves,
it shatters. She slips from the room,
running from the remnants.

iii. Truth.

They had a sister with a voice full
of sun. In the morning, her words
sprouted leaves. She gave the sprouts to
anyone who asked, forgetting people
lost earth. Weeds swelled between
sentences. Her hair faded. She fractured
on thorns. In her hand was a seed.

tomorrow, they collect time.

She carries secrets deep in her chest, braids maps into her hair. Her sleep yells.
Something about a kitchen. When the sun rises, he finds
her dresses flapping on branches, stitched with carrots. He smokes
the air, inhales questions through his teeth.

There is a wilting face, a snow falling voice.
He breaks earth to plant years, washes confusion from his fingers.
Still she weeps. Her heart shakes all summer, cradling
small seeds and spraining weeds.

Now the back of her dresses shed dirt, her palms home for
petals. Rain cuts the ground to streamers and
the sky coughs up gray as they hang pebbles out to dry. The
sun, clattering. The strings she plucks like a harp.

In the backyard they tack maps onto the fence, chart their
dreams with blue ink. Bleeding, snaking rivers through rows of seeds.
Two weeks later, the tips of the carrots are blue and he runs laps between
the shoots. The hanging maps rain white ash and she forgets forests.

Sunday, she gives him white stones for a cup of
moon. The stars, smooth and gray. The sky,
rumpled into the trees. Across the galaxy, they
flicker and she paints Orion onto Russia with watercolors,
what does it mean? His question a pit.

Like a nymph, she slips into trees holding the earth down
with all their might. Her friends are wolves. Her feet
are bare. In the yellow kitchen, he watches the light shatter on, off.
She twists the diamond on her finger and chokes on stones. In the
morning, her smile petrifies.

Sun crumbles on her pillow, burning the
edges where she used to sleep. On his back is a tattoo
saying, I love you in Greek. He cranes his neck
to read what's written in green and his shoulders are
leaves, bending. The bathroom smells sour from dye.

She leaves a ball of yarn by his shoes,
unraveling, and a photograph. I just remembered,
I hate carrots. Her hair is blue. Someday she will learn to tie.

A lightning storm slices the air black. Hail, he thinks.
Later, he watches the pebbles slip out of their string
wings. When she comes in the morning to gather her
dresses, the ground is taped shut.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by alex anne

weekending.

woke early friday,
to gather bags
finish packing
prepare

only to
stumble into
the car, head
to a drivethrough
for breakfast,
sleep

until stopping
halfway to stretch
and eat a gooey
margherita pizza
we

arrived in
sturgeon bay,
drove the winding road
20 miles per
hour

said hello
proceeded to unpack
ate croissants for
dinner and

waking,
found ourselves
ushered into
a cottage
a family
a love story

for the weekend,
we shot a wedding
left tired but
rested.


(imagine
that)

eyes full of moon.

Sorrow, I think is not
an old man with gnarled fingers.
Rather, she is a young woman
with a beautiful face,
and eyes full of moon,
and hands burned red.
She wears white gloves and
bracelets that jangle to say,
look at me,
look at my loneliness full
in the face.
You need be gentle, when
gentleness is not called for.
Take her aside and bandage her hands when
they bleed.
Wash each and every finger with water
from the white basin sink,
in the bathroom with the
milk green tiles.
Do not fear your reflection.
Sorrow has many names, but always
the same eyes.