I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul (14 Days)

My heart has been melting all morning. I prayed at the same window that I used to go to in those first frantic, tender mornings right after I came home from Houston. The sunlight pouring over the mountain and trees and my backyard was comforting to me; I was so newly home that I felt most of the time that I didn't have any skin...I was oozing, falling apart, and the tiniest things were painful because I'd been scrubbed so raw. I remember the first week and second and third begging the same thing out into the sunshine: Perdoname Senor por haberme alejado de ti...I said the same thing this morning. Then I came downstairs and I'm listening to the music that made up the walls of my world 5 summers ago. I had a dear friend then who told me humbling stories about my dark ages and I had a peculiar sensation of erasure. He said he knew why he loved me in the first place but not in the second or third. There was so much lining of the world that I hadn't unraveled in those days although I felt burdened by all I did know. I carry my memories with me, little weights in my pockets like chess pieces. I take them out and arrange them, that dead game, and think, what if I'd made this move? Or this one? If only I had known. Looking at them this morning, they seem like houses too small to contain me now. There is an ineffable brightness moving across the sky.

The doctor I met with yesterday told me that marriage is the hardest and most heartbreaking thing in the world. Her husband died two months ago of a brain tumor (at age 49) and they were not happy. I looked into her eyes and I believed her, but I wasn't afraid. She told me that she was excited for me, but that she also felt really bad for me because of what I would go through. So we talked about loss. We talked about the loss someone unhappy in a marriage feels and the loss of never being married, loss of certain freedoms when you become a mother or the loss of never holding your own baby. What lasts at the end of life and what you lose by choosing to trust someone or choosing to never trust anyone. If it is worth more to stay forever the princess on the tower telling all the lovestruck Romeos "It's just that time [is] wrong" or to become stripped of your defenses, fall into vulnerability with all your flaws exposed, and through that pain change into a better version of yourself. I loved talking with her because there was no idle chatter and no wasted words. We spoke the whole time only about the things that are most dear to us. It seems fitting that in such a personal situation we'd discuss the most personal things...I wasn't expecting that, but I liked it that way. :) After the exam she told me she wished Jonathan was there so she could tell him that he was a very lucky guy. She told me that I'm in the right field and that it shows in how I carry and express myself. And then she hugged me, in my paper shirt, right before she left. It felt like something out of a book, and also like I proved something to myself. I know that life will bring pain and I accept that. But I have a bright companion and I don't have to be in the dark unless I choose that. I want to choose light, choose goodness, choose to be childlike and not bitter. The only way out is up.