Hello.

How are things?

Something random happened this morning that made the blood drain from my face. It fell in puddles at my feet. I had to swish through a ruby river of my own life just to get to class. Let me explain.

STUMBLING INTO THE PAST

I was walking across campus this morning when I saw all of these teenagers lining up. I figured they were on a tour. I resumed my role as an example of what a college student looks like. Look kids, that stressed out bundle of heartbreak and dreams could be you. As a senior, I’m used to being the spectacle, the point of envy to the younger kids who are still being sold the idea that college will be the best time of their life. But as I got closer, I froze. My heart stopped. I heard an exhausted, monotonous voice on a megaphone ordering a single file line. She was explaining the importance of being in the correct spot, in order to ensure that you received the correct diploma. Oh shit.

My body knew it before my mind. These weren’t kids taking a tour of my campus, they were kids practicing for their high school graduation. They weren’t looking at me with envy, I was looking at them. (Click here to read why I didn’t get a high school graduation) It shouldn’t have been a big deal. It shouldn’t have given my whole body chills. But I went pale. I felt faint. I am not a person who cries unexpectedly, but I was crying then. And that surprised me. It really did. It reminded me of the pain that still echoes off the walls of my heart like the wail of a ghost from things that happened or didn’t happen far too long ago now.

So I was walking with my eyes straight ahead and my music very loud and tears were somehow falling down my face. I felt possessed. Overtaken. I just kept walking. I made sure, if of nothing else, to not look back, to not steal another glance at that mundane, painfully boring right of passage. The one that dissolved in the palm of my hand during that spring when the world stopped. I felt very strongly that if I did look back, there would have been nothing to stop me from walking right over there and getting in that line. I’m almost twenty-one. I’ll graduate from college in six months. I am light years away from where I was then. I know this. But there is a part of me that is still seventeen and she is still standing all alone in her Doc Martens on the football field, waiting for a goodbye that never came. I know that I tell this story all of the time, but it finds me. It finds me in moments like this when I am just walking to class. I was only walking to class. But there is was, telling itself to me as if I didn’t already know it like the back of my hand.

Moving on is like that. You can go as far as you want but you’ll always see the world through your experiences of it. You’re always taking them with you. Whether it’s been three months or three years or a lifetime, the things that have happened to you will play out on random street corners and you will inevitably find yourself stumbling into them on your way to the grocery store. Even if it doesn’t hurt anymore, even if you haven’t thought about it in years, it will always be there. And it will find you, if only to remind you of what made you who you are. Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting or ceasing to feel. It’s more like learning to walk alongside all of your ghosts and accept their presence as a vital part of you and how you came to be. They are the bitter cherry pit and you are the sweet, ruby flesh that grew around it.

CHERRY PITS & CIGARETTES

When I first found out that cherry pits were lethal, I about died from the poetry of it all. I used to sit outside in the grass with a bowl full of red cherries in my lap that suddenly felt a lot more like a bowl full of metaphors. We place the cherry in our mouth, we steal the sweetest, most beautiful parts of it, and then we spit out the hard and ugly thing that gave life to all of that beauty. The poisonous part. The part that we don’t know how to process. It would kill us if we tried. But we still let it linger in our mouths. We enjoy dancing with death, as long as we get to lead. It’s fundamentally gorgeous. It’s being a twelve year old girl and seeing Augustus Waters rest an unlit cigarette between his lips and thinking that that was just the most brilliant thing that you ever saw.

The point is, sometimes it all still feels like a cherry pit under my tongue. It’s this thing that could kill me if I let it, if I cracked it open and let its toxic cyanide seep into my bloodstream like a terrorist to my sanity. But I don’t. And I don’t spit it out either because what a waste that would be. People who have been shot often want to keep the bullet. They don’t want to throw away the thing that tried to kill to them, they want to own it. It’s theirs now and this? This is mine. All of my stories are in that cherry pit and I keep them close, right under my tongue. Sometimes they spill into my speech. Sometimes I wonder if I taste like cyanide, if my saliva would tell the stories of that cherry pit if you put it under a microscope. But I keep them close anyway because they make me feel strong. They make me feel human.

I watch a lot of crime shows and I’ve always wondered who the hell would ever want to be a coroner. But it must be pretty interesting, to dissect the secrets that a body can keep. To peer inside of the cavity that contains the multitude of us from the day that we are born. To read the secrets that sometimes not even the mind can bear to retain. The ones that are etched across our hearts and carved into sunken marrow of our bones. Their job is to find one cause of death, but I bet that they find trillions, bursting like stars just beneath the skin.

All of this reminds me of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, a favorite book of mine that happened to be in my bag all day today. A must read author if you haven’t. I’ve completely poured my heart out about her here in The Writer Who Saved My Life if you need a place to start.

Take care. And remember to look up at the sky sometimes.

love, m.

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