Instead of waiting idly, I throw things away. I declutter. I scavenge artifacts of inked pasts to reveal parts demanding to be filed away.
The helpless child has been freed. But she leaves behind her old habits.
Her crying, biting, and running away. Never secure and always afraid. Every man is a threat. She is powerless. She is mute.
Not wanting to be abandoned, she is stubborn yet agreeable at all the wrong times. She is adventurous yet timid because she knows a secret. She develops a scowl as if she were a beast to keep predators at bay. To be undesirable. To not be approachable. To be left alone. She hides herself. She hides her beauty to stay in tact. To be kept safe. She imagine a bubble to keep everything out. This also means nothing can enter.
She makes connections where there is none. She attributes her scowl or her beastly ability for escaping the thorny nightmare. She thinks what she had engineered as a child is what kept her alive.
Simple truth remained unseen. Bad things happen with no reason. The end had nothing to do with the child’s efforts or her fighting spirit.
The child remains.
I thought I had set her free. But she lingers and I must get rid of all her hiding places. So that she can be free to go into the light. She is still used to the darkness.
Tears fall as I file and shred.
I wish I could tear these memories into strips of paper, pack them into trash bags and leave them out on the curb to be picked up and thrown away. Leave me and my house. I wish it were easy.
So that I can be free of this burdensome shadow. So that I can be free to let the air in. So that I can finally disembark from this bubble of protection.
But I know better. Gibran writes, “work is love made visible”
The only way is through what the Lion calls furnace of truth. I must throw into his mouth her old habits and childish connections. I must feed fire with more truth until the furnace roars and breathes out ashes to extinguish the darkness feeding on omission and avoidance. To let the fire create light so I can see what I had been hiding for too long. To illuminate the monsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to be seen and acknowledged.
This is another journey I hadn’t planned on embarking on. The fire makes my eyes water and tears stream down once again.
I don’t want to be here, yet this is exactly where I am supposed to be.