It's been a year

A year ago I was a different animal. Not a different person. A different animal. I moved through rooms like something wounded moves. Carefully. Close to the walls. Checking the exits not because I wanted to leave but because the knowing was the only thing that made staying bearable. I smiled at the right times. I answered the texts. I showed up to the things. And underneath the showing up was a second woman lying on her side in a room no one could see, waiting for the waiting to end.

The waiting didn’t end. It just changed shape.

At first it was sharp. A key in the chest. Something metal and precise that turned every time I thought about it, which was always, which was every room, which was the grocery store and the car and the shower and the space between sleep and awake where you have no defenses and the truth walks in without knocking.

Then it was dull. Which was worse. Because sharp pain has an outline. You can locate it. You can say here. It hurts here. Dull pain has no address. It just lives in the building. It’s in the plumbing. It’s in the wiring. You can’t point to it but you can feel it every time you turn something on.

Then one morning. I don’t remember which one. A Tuesday probably. It always happens on a Tuesday.

I made coffee. And I drank the coffee. And I looked out the window. And the window was just a window. Not a frame for the life I used to have. Not a screen I was projecting memories onto. Just glass. Just morning. Just light doing what light does when no one asks it to mean anything.

That was the first morning.

There have been others since. Not every morning. But enough. Enough mornings where the window is just a window and the coffee is just coffee and my first thought is about the day and not about the year and my body doesn’t brace when I open my eyes.

I keep a list. Not on paper. In my body. A list of things I’ve gotten back.

My appetite. That came back in month three. Not fully. In increments. First I could eat without tasting the sadness underneath the food. Then I could taste the food. Then I could cook for myself again without the cooking feeling like a performance of normalcy. Then I could eat slowly. Slowly was the last thing to return. Because slow means you’re not rushing through the meal to get to the other side of it. Slow means you’re in it. And being in something, after a year of trying to get through things, felt like a different language.

My handwriting. It got small for a while. I noticed it in my journal. The words shrank. As if the hand writing them was trying to take up less space. As if even on the page I was making myself smaller. It’s bigger now. Not performatively. Just returned to its original size. The way a plant returns to standing after you move it back into the light.

My laughter. Not the one I performed. The other one. The one that comes from the belly and surprises me and sounds, for a half second, like someone I used to be. That one was gone for a long time. It came back on a Sunday in a kitchen with a friend who said something that wasn’t that funny and I laughed anyway and the laugh was real and I stood there afterward holding it in my chest like something I’d found on the ground. Something I’d lost and stopped looking for and there it was. Just sitting there. Waiting for me to pick it up.

There are things I haven’t gotten back. I want to be honest about that because the piece doesn’t work if I pretend this is a resurrection story.

I haven’t gotten back the ease. The thing I used to have where I could sit across from someone new and not calculate. Not run the numbers in my head. Not think about the cost of opening. The ease was the first thing to go and I think it might be the last thing to return, if it returns at all, and I’ve made peace with the possibility that it won’t. That some things don’t come back. They just get replaced by something harder and quieter that does the same job with more effort and less joy.

I haven’t gotten back the believing. In forever. In the thing people say when they hold your face and look at you like you’re the answer. I loved that believing. I wore it like my grandmother’s pendant. Close to my chest. Warm from my own skin. And it got taken. Not by a person. By a lesson. And lessons don’t give back what they take. They just leave you smarter in a place where you used to be soft.

But here’s what I got that I didn’t have before.

I got my own ground. Not the ground someone else provided. Not the floor of a relationship or a title or a name next to mine. My ground. The kind I poured. The kind that holds because I built it and I know where the foundation is because I dug it with my hands.

I got the morning. Every morning I wake up and my first thought is not about it is a morning I earned. Not by getting over it. By getting through it. There is no over. There is only through. And through is ugly and slow and it looks nothing like healing from the outside. From the outside it looks like a woman buying groceries and going to work and answering her phone. From the inside it looks like a war fought in complete silence by a person who never let the room see her bleed.

The room never saw me bleed.

That’s not a boast. That’s the habit. The training. The thing I learned from my mother who learned it from her mother who learned it from a world that told women their pain was a private matter and their composure was a public service.

But I bled. I want that on the record. Not for sympathy. For accuracy. I bled and I built and I bled and I showed up and I bled and I wrote and I bled and I made coffee and I bled and I looked out the window and I waited for the window to become just a window again.

It did.

A year.

I am not healed. I am not whole in the way I used to define whole. But I am standing. With my head up. In a room I didn’t leave. In a life I didn’t abandon. In a body that learned to carry the wound without letting the wound carry me.

The light comes in from the window now without me asking it to mean anything. The coffee is just coffee. The morning is just the morning.

And I am just a woman who survived a year she wasn’t sure she’d get through. Standing in the kitchen. Head up. Hands open. Still here. And still here is enough.