Day one or just another day, isn’t that something they say?
Day one of letting it flow. Just let it flow.
I saw my massage therapist today for my manual Lymphatic Drainage, which if you are wondering, is a slow body moving technique meant to get that hidden liquid surrounding the body moving. Most people don’t get this kind of bodywork unless they have had surgery, but I am never like most people, so I get them monthly in hopes they get this stardust body that is all too biologically real an advantage over it acquiring our early demise from this cruel yet exhilarating world.
The problem is the water. This everyone says to me.
The problem is not the water, it is actually instead the me not letting the water flow.
Me holding it up like a damn, but only my shoulder’s phantom soreness knows this.
So many bodyworkers look at me and say it’s a water issue.
A water issue is an emotional issue, and they might as well say this to a deaf person who can’t read lips. My air moon and I are looking past them for the answer, but there is no answer to be found, why you ask? Well, my love, it is because the answer is most often found behind us.
It’s an emotional issue, but I stumble on what emotions are. Feelings so fleeting and whimsy can one even trust the thudding of rage and glee?
The trouble is they say it’s an emotional issue to a girl who only operates on the thinking that a solution is possible and that she herself can somehow, no matter what, achieve this feat of uncanny human ability.
They tap my ankle, run a finger up the water line, and say there’s something stuck here. They tap my collar and say what are you holding here?, and I think to myself no, it has to be more than the recreational dose of mushroom chocolate I’m still burping up from the weekend.
It’s a water issue, and I wonder why I keep seeing a dessert of bones turned into a grave yard that was never meant to hold stones with engravings forever.
Instead it was just meant to be an underwater grave hiding the plethora of debris life takes to keep living. All the bones we leave to float to the bottom.
Won’t the water take them away?
If the water comes, who will hold the memory? and I wonder how a person must learn to go to the dams of her past of all the wayward love that still breaks me in half when I realize life worked out so far from an ideal, and I thought back then it was just regular life.
The ones lost to disease and demons, the ones lost to the path, the ones you lose, throw away, and drop, the ones who do this to you, what do you do with all these things? What to do when you know it is a whole childhood of yourself in there too. If the water comes, will it just wash it all away?
The sweet little vigilante swinging her backpack at her cousin’s bullies, that sassy teen walking into her grandparent’s house after cutting her own hair into an uneven chin-length do and eating grapes in just the way her grandpa hated because she loved pissing him off. The girl who broke too many hearts and sat three across a big boat of a car singing and laughing her senior year of high school away.
All those tombstones are really just sand castles, aren’t they, though?
But who am I if they all become who I am not? I am a part in the story that just was, a lost tomb washed away by the sea, glittering in its depressing magnificence like the Titanic.
A shipwreck long sunk instead of a commemorative tomb with visiting hours, where some version of me long gone pretends she still exists in the world now, giving tours around her resentment and anger.
This is hard for me. I can feel the choke up. I can feel the shaking. The fear of what happens when the water takes me up from this dry dessert im living in.
Do I know what the issue is? No, yes, maybe. When the time’s right.
It is too late now anyway. As I wrote these words, I hit that lever, and the water is coming to cover up the bones. I do believe I must have failed all the love lost to that pitt. Somehow, turning this flowing river into a dessert valley has been my penance for all the sadness I have had for all the ways my life didn’t go, but I also know this lifetime is not meant for me to pay for the never could be.
Every ask from the turn of the cards gets more complex, the reflection gets more profound and more clear, and it is always just me and my beautiful aging face staring back at me with a new hairstyle.
Every day more and more I get to know that all these memories from the beautiful, the traumatic and even the indifferent can still come with me even if I flood this valley and stop watering the flowers in vases by the graves.
Leaving the parts of me there to get washed back into the bigger picture of things. A little bit broken from it all if we are being honest. A little bit furious about things I never did have any control over.
It is all a bit like trying to climb up a slippery slide, and lord knows I would never try that IRL. So I will wait for the water to get here, and I learn to control my breath under the water and grab a tube float when it makes its way by.
