Home

One day a little before the Watson, I held a flower and a blade of grass in my hands. I turned the flower in my left hand, observing it. I was surprised. I was overjoyed. I was finally holding a flower without my fingers automatically folding and cutting at it.

Then I looked at the blade of grass in my other hand, and noticed I’d crumpled it up and sucked it dry with my thumb.

I thought, how much, and what kind of work do I need to do, so that when I hold something I don’t destroy it?

I forgot about that for a year, but when I look back now, I see that the whole year I was searching for answers to this, and encountering these sorts of challenges. Several times, I lived very closely with people who were very difficult to live with. I had to learn how to coexist with them, and encourage the best in both them and in myself — to be an ally, even to the people who can only see enemies.

This became a point that seriously challenged me. Whether I knew it or not, I was learning how to deal with qualities that I saw in my parents and that I experienced in my own upbringing — numbing feelings, feelings of paranoia and crippling regret, neurotic masks to hide gaping hurts, and the lives of lost puppies.

I came home because, armed with a spiritual practice that gave me psychological stability and with the love and support of a theatre group that had given me another upbringing during COVID, I felt ready to love my family. I knew that I was exiting a place that felt like Paradise and re-entering a place that, throughout my life, has felt like the Inferno. I felt like I was finally ready to confront that place, sit with it, and no matter what, to be okay.

I’m still okay. I think, though it’s really emotionally strenuous to be here, that my memories are slowly opening up, and that even if it turns out I can only help myself, then I’ll have helped myself a great deal by being here. I harbor a little hope that addressing trauma here is the key to solving my cough. I don’t know. I’m trying not to be attached to that hope.

Work To Do
I pick a withered, brown flower between my thumbs.
Another day, my automatic fingers would have creased its stem, tucked; creased and tucked
Until crumpled, thumb-sucked, it’d have fallen.

It turns, softly upon my forefinger, already dead.

In my other hand, a small green leaf, picked from the ground, nails stabbing and feeling juice, fingers
stacking it into slivers.