10-13

My limbs are limp. There's a loosening between my shoulders.

I'm not sure how to take it. It's a nice feeling. It's an awareness of my body I'm unused to sensing. Something has been unwound. Pieces within me, tight and sharp, that barbed wire in my spine, are relaxing.

I think it might be nice to be touched.

I don't recoil at the idea. I think maybe I would not shy away from hands right now.

Maybe this is me moving on.

I ask my cards if I'll ever recover and they say no. In no uncertain terms.

It's disappointing but not surprising. I loved once. I always knew I would be a woman who only loves once.

I would have preferred to be a woman who never loved.

I ask if I'll love again and it's not optimistic.

But there will be others. I'll let him touch me. There will be more. I'll let them put their hands between my scapula bones and stroke and release the tension there, let them touch my jaw and my hair but not my neck because the memory of hard hands on my neck will always linger.

It may not be the wild, strange, angry overwhelming love I felt before, but I think that will be better. I would like a love that does not burn me out, lighter fluid on coals, a flash, a flare, a violence that leaves me cold and empty.

I remember how loving him made my lungs tight and my body tense with panic and anxiety and so much angry love I didn't know what to do with it so it solidified within me, and I do not miss that. I am loose now. I can bend and adjust and move, and I can form my body around another. I was ice, I was bronze, I was cement, and now I am fluid like a slow-moving river, muddied but determined.

Time heals wounds but so does willingness, and I want to heal. I want to flow on and drown that poison love in my current.