Rising from the Ashes

Her knees hammered to the ground, her nails rusted with rain smelling soil, the truth shimmering in the pit of her stomach, the words unsaid springing in the center of her bones, virulent ideas mazing in the crown of her head, and undisclosed desires ravaging her empty chest, she glanced at it. On the glass-coated surface, she saw herself. She couldn’t describe the image staring at her, but she could feel it. I can feel her. The day old mascara was running down her face drawing her sorrows, racing on the porcelain bumps of her cheeks, crawling on the curve of her lips. She could feel the tangled strings of her brain wrestling, tears burning her eyes, her ears bleeding his words. She was hemorrhaging his venom out of her body, out of her soul.


But one thing she didn’t know: the spine grasped it all, the spine remembered it all.
The spine, clustered at the center of our bodies, a nailed pillar carrying the symmetric axe of our souls.
The spine, a bone-structured reservoir of our memories.

The spine, castle of our every shiver, every emotion, every tingly feeling that electrifies our bodies.
The spine that reminisces the magic of our lives, but also the most haunting moments we wish we could erase or not.

She remembered it all, with every breath she took, she was breathing a fragrant rainbow colored with memories, pictures, laughs… Her soul was fed, her loneliness vanished…
She felt like a butterfly in her own queendom… A butterfly that flutters for a day and thinks that it’ll last forever…

Looking back at the mirror, she felt like a butterfly caged in a jar with a steel knife in her windpipe, her wings clipped, her colors coated with sewage. With gravel in her throat urging her eyes to cry, she smashed the mirror with her fist… She loved the pain, she was wired that way, it made her feel alive, it made her feel real. You may think she’s a masochist, but I think that it was the labor that would deliver her phoenix, her savior, her light…

SN