Once again I return
I return to this space of no return. A simple word, hope, guides some immortal, immovable part within me. Something I have fought against, held down under layers and layers of disillusion and despair. It has circled its way back to me again, awakening that primordial force coursing beneath my veins, making me visit the future, wishing for something beyond the mundane dualities of my life. The day that repeats itself, the one i escape from in simple pleasure, things i do not see twice, like a crow carrying a stolen egg form the nest of some defenseless family. This day does not repeat itself twice, for now i have opened up to something far grander, something far more moving, earth building, star rattling. This one single word, this force, this power, this hope.
I asked for it to be gone, so i could dissolve back into the great void, my body a moving machine, running, eating, sleeping less than it should. Dancing to fight its way through the agony. I wished it to disappear so that maybe I too could disappear. My energy a flatline, my life one moving moment to the next. Presence coursing through me, i called it ‘training’ until i was laid out bare and exposed up on the cold stone of a tomb, surrounded by the demons of friends and enemies alike. This wicked and cruel thing, this despicable and harmful thing. This glorious and beautiful and most necessary thing. This hope. It could lead me off a cliff or it could save my life. I think at present it’s doing the latter.
I cursed its name, for how could any of us wish for something we do not know? Something that we cannot see, something we only hear and dream about, something raw and ravaging and shattering. Something mending and something sacred. All sides of me approach this table, they sit around, they converse, they scream, cry, beg, moan, they gasp in pleasure and release, they plead for mercy, they demand answers. For the one thing they all have in common is this one single thread tying them all together. Hope. For they know that this bomb has been dropped, this ball has begun rolling agin, and in its wake the story continues on. All of it, the agony, the despair, and the soul filling life. The bounty of softness and grace and ecstasy, the terror and the pain. It all comes forth as this stone rolls off the grave and exposes the body beneath, the one who rises from the dead and says “I stand again, I stand for life, I stand for honor and I stand for love. The darkness will not prevail within me, for the light inside of me has already won.”
A bitter part of me scoffs and turns away, blind ambivalence seeming like a proper approach to any situation in which i do not want to be broken again. Afraid to feel, afraid to face the fact that I do not know what is coming, that I do not know if i will be ready, that i do not know anything of much at all beyond this moment and what i have learned before, yet knowing beyond reason that hope is what is pulling me forth. Threading my soul back together again. Stitch by stitch i am woven in intriguing and elegant patterns and swirls, dark feathery wings stretch around me in its wake. Sharp thorns as the needle, spiders silk as the thread. Worn and tired hands as the maker, intention within every push and pull and piercing of the skin. Hands that have lived lives beyond what the eye can tell, lives beyond what the mind can comprehend. Unfathomable horrors and great kingdoms of light, these hands weave and weave and weave. They sew, they mend, they tend, and they create. And they do not stop in their relentless pursuit of love. This is why the spark has never died. The fire may have burned to embers, a heart nearly flatlined. But that single spark remained, for the weaver told it as so. Woven in by the hands of fate, she tended and breathed life back into me again. Through a fire or through a tapestry or through a single prayer, the weaver has brought me back from the dead.
And this time, I will not stay down.
This time, I will live.
For i have heard it in my dreams and nothing can stop me from burning as bright as the star that I am born of.
The star that has not died, only exploded and been reborn into invite galaxies.
