One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
You are living the life you wanted as if you’d known what that was but of course you didn’t so you’d groped toward it feeling for what you couldn’t imagine, what your hands couldn’t tell you, for what that shape could be.
This Sunday the rain turns cold again and steady but the window is slightly open and there is the vaguest sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps between the buildings because it’s spring the calendar says and the room where you are reading is empty yet full of what loves you and this is the day that you were born
hardest thing to learn during recovery is….. some of your misery is your own fault. you have to actively choose to stop wallowing in your own pain & start to recover. that means stop being self deprecating, start taking care of yourself, start eating healthy, start taking your hygiene seriously, even if it’s hard. & it is hard! but you must.
