The Great Spring II

Flowers don't heal suffering any more than the rain can prevent a wildfire.

Digging through a mottled corpse, mangled from anxieties and past memories made real by fear and brought back to life by shame and sorrow is not how I pictured my post pandemic life, and yet, here I am. Rebuilding pieces of what I thought was at one time a capable pile of bones.

A life adrift is not what I expected it to be. In my youth I craved to live on the coast of the Northwest, to work as a dockhand in a ruined pair of overalls with carefree dreams stapled haphazardly upon my chest, to become myself through nothing if not the heave of tireless work. Imagine what it would be like, to wake up each morning to a fresh bowl of clam chowder. To feel the fog roll in, to know it in your bones that this new day was not decided. That beyond the fog there was a ship waiting for you, to know that you were that close to a life entirely unburdened that you could live in peace and sleep as much the same. To live each day upon the stories of the seas, retread by the tongues of fisherman and captains and to know that out there, the world is wide and deep and frantic.

I craved a life which I did not have the capacity to lead.

Perhaps my eagerness to be in such a state is what brought about the situation I have since found myself. In the past months at sea I’ve had plenty of time to consider my life and my choices. There is nothing else beneath the golden sun that provokes self discovery more than loneliness. For each night I fell asleep wondering why I am the way I am, and each afternoon riding home from my job wondering what brought me so swiftly to my knees I found a tiny seed.

Still, those dreams of eager youth became a forbidden fruit as each day I would don my overalls and march to the dock where a fisherman or captain would be waiting for me. Eager to unload their quarry of life, in dreams and fears and hurt. Boxes upon boxes of memories I carried from that phantom dock and back into my own home. Guided by naught but the light of the nearby lighthouse I helped those fishermen unpack their longing and their loss. When each day was through I sat alone surrounded by what I had come to know in the stench of fish the filled the hallways of my home. Even still, I miss what that time was for me. A time in which I pledged my allegiance to nothing beyond the kinship of my brethren, a time that I made myself, a monolith upon the left behind and forgotten pain and joy of those who often came to visit me. Before long, I found myself eager to grow. I took the leftovers that I could stomach and swallowed the tack. In those mist cloaked mornings I made myself a home out of what little lumber I owned. I built and changed and contorted those rooms each day. When a friend would visit I would shoulder their burden. I would make it my own. A new tear in the sack cloth and a new wall for my mansion.

Years of this came and passed, until I had built myself a home I found suitable. An abode for a king, that was sometimes lonely, sometimes full of light and life, with each passing of the lighthouse my insides were illuminated and I still remember the shrieking of the winds in the mornings when the flame of that white tower blazed upon all of the pain I held. Pain of friends and failures and family mystery. Pain of death and dismemberment of joy. A debt, I owed to each of those captains and fisherman that I'd come to love so dearly, though they never asked of me to steal their burdens I did and wondered when someone would steal from mine.

Such a blistering, blinding thing was the burn from the lighthouse peak. With woe I found myself jealous of the flame. That it believed it could guide the lives of friends and loved ones, and even strangers upon the sea better than me, the man who had built his house from their fears. Though the nearby lighthouse guided all of them to me, it was not merely enough for my ravenous desire. More, I craved, that I could be a lighthouse myself. My duty was more sacred than it, I pondered over a cold bowl of soup on more than one occasion. It took from me my purpose, I had believed. So, I took from it the flame. I lit the pyre atop my home, kindling peeled from my very skin and bone as I sent the blaze alight to warn and guide and hope on behalf of my betters. I burned my flesh into the night sky above the forest behind me and above all, the sea. A frail hope to cast my being into the sky and believe for a time that I was the map by which they would find a home. That if I could hold their grief and excitement, and everything in between that I too could illuminate the night sky like a blanket of stars, that I could be the grinning in the evening that they would need. That I could be everything.

To stretch a linen rag around a bleeding wound will halt the flow of blood, but will not heal the cut. So it was with myself as I set my heart on fire in the night, to one day burn across the sky a billowing pillar of smoke and love. But just as the rag knows, the blood may have halted, but the wounds were still a piece of me. With no one home to care for the state of my mansion of bones it began to wear thin. Day by day as I tried to coalesce into the lives of those I hadn't seen in years, back home, I began to crack.

You know where those cracks have led me, today. A solemn raft in a more solemn sea. I am floating with intention, back in my own body. When the roof caved in the burning fire doused itself in the lake that made my living room and in a moment I was no longer smoke, or warmth. I was cold, and wet, and alone.

Here on the sea, waiting for dry land, I have taken few things. Only what is light that I might travel long and one day make a life better with what could grow from within, even if my life is the only one I touch. This small pouch of seeds I bore through strife unlike any I'd felt before, and perhaps I may yet crash into the sea and spill what little I have left into the great depths below. I know I was never meant to be a sailor, but I was never meant to be a deckhand either. I profited off of the words of others, and the stories I could craft for myself to bring others into my home, to show them what I created.

Perhaps, with each of my tears crystallized into a seed, I will know myself by my future. I will begin to unfurl the stories I've told myself for my entire life, and I will begin to tell them again. New, and honest this time, each page of my life unfurled on the leaves of trees I don't yet know. Perhaps I will be a different man when this is over, perhaps when this is over, I will not be, at all.

To say that this is beautiful would be a falsehood so baked in emotional turns of phrase and idealistic dreams that even the words wouldn’t know what they meant. Out here adrift, alone, without hope of finding land is not beauty encapsulated. There is beauty in the night sky, the sounds of wildlife in the forest just before the sun peers across the horizon. There is beauty in the joy of making something honest out of yourself, with your hands. There is beauty, even, in the cold flame of the lighthouse that I’ve drifted so far from, I can barely see. There is beauty in a handful of seeds, born of misery and memory and contempt of self. But there is not beauty in this new life, of unknowing and contempt. Whatever we must say to push through our attempts at seeing the silver lining exist and demand nothing further. To chide our failures with encouragement and clever turns of phrase only serve to fool me out of my brokenness. I was once made up of silver linings, and I still melted into slop at the hands of the lighthouse flame, the weight of someone else’s pain. I once believed my words could heal the world, I believed that if I called it beautiful, then beautiful it would become. I prided myself on those lies, but brokenness won’t be mended by naming it something new. Should an uninvited guest appear in your doorway, you would not call it a friend unless you invited him in.

Do not call this journey beauty, or wonder, or magical. Glimpses of those things may flicker through the linen clouds above, but they are not what this is. To be broken, the lose the home within yourself is not beautiful.

It is terrifying.