Lucky: 3

“Just cry,” she said. “ It's ok.”

And I try to let it come out but it stops midstream like there is an internal safety switch I never installed.

“I never cried as a child,” I told her.

My tears pooled up inside my tiny body like a flood and so I found other ways.

They made their way out in storms. I felt the trembling before they came. The shaking of my atoms. And then rain. So much rain that the ground couldn't hold it.

I sat there in her office listening to the drips escaping through the ends of my fingertips in time with the ticking of the clock. A pool forming underneath me. I worried about the mess.

“It's safe here,” she said, reading my panic at too much of me being revealed. “Just try to remember.”

I went back to the lake. The day the anger came into me. The day my small body couldn't contain the pain being inflicted. I should've cried then. But I watched as three small tornadoes hovered above the lake waters, my eyes locked onto the alchemy of wind and wave. It was like looking in a mirror.

I told her, “If I'm out of the water too long, I feel wrong.”

Maybe the tears stopped because I keep drying up. I lay in bath after bath because it's the only time I feel held. It's the only place I feel home. There, I can pull the pieces of metal from my skin and hear the voice of my Mother. My hands don't cry out from the pain of dehydration.

We speak of the choking. As if sometimes I forget how to breathe here.

“The tears won't come, but I've found other ways."

Outside the office window, a sudden storm blows in, ripping branches. The rain against the window in time with the water dripping from my fingers.

I start to feel the familiar itch again. I cannot return home yet, so I bring pieces of it to me, for now.

When I was 8, I was afraid of monsters. The dark felt like some thing lurking in the water, ready to grab me as soon as I turned my back. At night, I thrashed and gulped too much air when waking up to shadowy figures standing in the corners of my room. But when I got older, something changed. I realized that not everything is as it appears. I stopped running from monsters and spoke to them instead. And when I did, I realized I was only running from the monster I hid inside myself.

There was magic there, in the inky faces of my shadowy visitors. When my honesty and wholeness seeped out, so did theirs and I stopped running.

These days, humans scare me more. Not in a way that I run through the dark house feeling that chill on the back of my neck, but more of a distrust at what they are hiding while they play pretend. I'm scared of the way they kill each other for the color of another's skin or because someone lives in their authentic sexual fluidity. I'm scared of the soulless eyes of a person who commits atrocious acts against children and the way they blindly follow world leaders who are just pawns to a greater monster.

No, I'm not afraid anymore of demons and fallen angels and the visitors hobbling through my house every night. I've heard their cries of despair and they sound a lot like my own. Of being pushed down into a cage of hatred deep beneath the earth, their home. I've never related much to angels of light. I've tried because that's good, right? There's that word again: good. It falls flat for me.

I think we got it all wrong. Light and dark and all that. I've met the monsters, inside myself and the ones standing guard in the dark. We speak honestly and there is trust. Even the spider with the woman's head hanging from my ceiling has magic and wisdom to share. But I had to stop running from myself to hear her.

They've gifted me with memories of another time, where we lived in harmony and the faces we saw hid nothing. Where light and dark were honored equally and we lived in our true Being. Where we romped in the starry night together fully alive in our primal truth. In an unexpected plot twist, I have found safety in the creatures I was warned against my whole childhood.