‘Paradise Couldn’t Get Much Harder’
I always thought I brought the rain. Always apologizing for the clouds looming, for whatever backpack of storms I carried with me, tethered to my being, to my mannerisms. But it was sunny when I left and the next day it snowed, and I was gone. The sky turned gray and wept cold — like any former lover, in his hurt, tells you to go and stay gone; this space is now his and he will take care of it and you no longer have a place here.
I haven’t felt “home” in years, can’t beg a couch to feel permanent. Can’t beg an anything to feel permanent. Except the feeling of something bigger and looming, like a heatwave.
And the “home” I once had and knew to be a crack in the earth to land on gaped open and crumbled, making me stumble backwards on my heels, trying to not get sucked in.
Overstaying my visit there taught lessons. The kind of lessons that give way to panic, a prefacing of looking around the room, pondering wide-eyed, “is everyone getting this but me?” But there was nobody else, only myself, flexing my toes for elsewhere but not before “home” brought me up to the board in shame. And okay, I get it this time.
I recounted the last five years. Things I miss and things I wish I could never think about again. How my heart has stretched and how my stomach felt empty. The doctor’s offices, the funerals, the love that made me believe in love again, and the men who made me feel stupid for the former. And here I sit, in a room I call my own, with no one on the line, no one on the bench. No more apologizing for the rain. Because there is no rain. And I brought the sunshine.
And maybe this time it’s mine. And I’ll keep it my hands like a secret, like something to peer into when I let the clouds roll in or remember I don’t have a job and words don’t flow like they used to and the days my heart weeps to feel arid once again.
Maybe it was a mistake to move. I used to think I racked those up. But my stomach is full of laughs I have not laughed yet and my mind is brimmed with hope that shriveled with the winter, watered by a stalactite that used to hang in my heart, melted by the love that I feel for the girl who winks at me in the mirror now. God, didn’t we miss her?
