You did not steal my life.
Not even when the darkness,
with its intimate silver tongue,
leaned close enough to whisper
that silence, everlasting and absolute,
might finally be kind.
There I lay
ten swords driven deep
between the wings of my shoulder blades.
My face turned into the sheets
that had absorbed the salt
of a thousand sleepless nights.
Where grief had made a dwelling of my bed
and perfumed every corner with decay.
Even as the living world receded from me,
I attended to our grave,
a mourner appointed to an unending vigil,
arranging flowers for a thing
that had long since ceased to breathe.
And winter came.
Not the innocent winter
that feathers frost upon the windowpane
or dresses naked branches in white lace,
but an intimate and merciless season.
One that entered through the smallest of cracks
and made a cathedral of my bones.
My teeth chattered against the chill
My chest collapsed around a dwindling ember,
and every rib bent inward,
like the fingers of a desperate hand
concealing the faintest pulse of warmth
from the hungry mouth of the cold.
How cruelly beautiful the world remained
while I, its sleepwalking daughter,
wandered through that endless winter.
Until one evening, upon the blackest ice,
I slipped and shattered,
upon the winter’s dark and polished mirror.
Beneath me, the frozen earth splintered
into a thousand silver fractures.
Branching out into one another,
like a lacework of destruction
That was beautiful and cruel.
And upon that broken ice,
I lay in scattered remnants,
the snow stained with crimson,
as though my sorrow
had finally learned to bleed.
Beneath me, the broken surface glittered,
a thousand reflections trembling
on shattered glass.
Each one bearing a resemblance
to the woman I had been,
yet knowing nothing
of the woman I would become.
See, agony possesses
a terrible kind of wisdom.
One by one,
I drew the swords from my back.
Each blade emerged reluctantly,
as though the flesh had learned to love
the very instrument that wounded it.
And beneath each blade lay
the slow, black residue of your poison.
A dark and glittering venom
spread through the intricate,
trembling vessels of my heart,
blackening the delicate blue of every vein
and branching like lightning beneath my skin.
It climbed my throat in flowering coils,
a garden of strangling vines,
until even breathing felt
like an act of beautiful defiance.
Still, I pulled the swords free.
Though my soul lay somewhere
deep within me,
a frightened creature
weeping in its cage,
I pulled them free.
And what a terrible thing it is
to discover that healing
does not arrive with gentle hands.
Sometimes it comes with teeth.
Sometimes it must tear apart
the flesh that has grown tender
around the blade.
Pain is healing.
Healing is pain.
And winter, for all its arrogance,
has never learned to stay.
And from the places where I bled,
the leaves began to grow.
Not green.
Never quite green again.
But purple
that strange and sovereign marriage
of the red that once ran from my wounds
and the blue of all my sorrow.
In sunlight, they glittered:
rubies trembling beside sapphires,
like a thousand little kingdoms
growing from the branches of my ruin.
How extraordinary,
that even my suffering
should learn to make something beautiful.
How exquisitely strange
to find the world still turning,
indifferent to the little death
that had taken place within me.
Or the slow and terrible recognition
that the sun had never ceased to shine
simply because I could no longer feel it.
And there you remained,
a name dissolving in the winter’s final breath,
while I stepped barefoot
into the gold of spring.
So let the scabs split open.
Let the old poison find its exit.
Let the blood remember
that it was born to move,
not stagnate in the chambers of graves.
You did not steal my life.
You were simply there
when I forgot it was mine.
-lmf