There are moments, she decided, when your past and your future collide and it feels like an accident. There is broken glass and screeching tired and screaming and your right hand shakes as you try to hold the pen between your fingers.
There are moments
when there is no truth left in you to be spoken, and that is when you need to
speak the truth most.
The words slipped
from her lips like turpentine, running like naked hooligans up and down the
aisles before she had a chance to capture them, smooth down their cowlicks and
straighten their collars. They simply existed without her knowledge, tumbling
out of her mouth one after another like small towheaded children rolling down a
grassy hill in June.
And while she rambled
on, all the while feeling this intersection between who you have been and who
you want to be, he watched her. His eyes were unwavering, despite how many
times she looked to see if he had shifted his glance, or flinched, cringed at
the sight of her horror and her wonder being birthed into existence.
To find your truth,
sometimes you have to get on all fours in the ashes and dig through them,
sifting through the rubble with bare hands. It is messy, and there are things
pulled from the ground that you would rather have stayed unearthed, but this is
how you grow. You speak your shame, illuminating it as it bursts into being.
And by speaking the words aloud, they lose some of their power.
He watched her, hands
curled around his coffee cup, and the way his eyes penetrated her being
unnerved her. It was like the moment before the crash, when you are trying to
brace yourself for impact. She kept waiting for the fallout, the one that
always followed. She was waiting for him to condemn her, like she had done to
herself all these years. She was looking for justification but he wasn’t giving
her any.
She hadn’t known
unconditional, unwavering love until she looked into his eyes. He had listened
to her story, untamed and wild, and chosen not to look away. And she could feel
it, the quiet roar within her starting to grow louder
Do you not know how strong my love for you is?
We are each given a story, a truth. It is
raw and unedited, sometimes messy, sometimes reckless. Sometimes your heart is
wearing so many scars it looks like someone has taken a paintbrush to it,
because there have been too many times you have tried to paint over the broken
places, finding love in places where it doesn’t belong.
Her heart was wind
worn, falling apart at the seams. There are marks from all the staples and tape
and glue she tried to use to hold herself together, one for every man she
romanced in attempts to numb the pain and she wears them like notches on a
bedpost.
And as she sat alone,
reflecting on the way He had looked at her, chosen her, put his claim on a
bruised and bleeding heart, whispering this
one is mine over the girl who has called herself unlovable, her body shook
with the emotion that was coursing through her veins.
You don’t get to
choose your story, she decided, but you do get to make peace with it. You get
to say “This is not how the story will end.”
You get to make that
choice to learn from the past, not change it, and use it to move you towards a
better future.
Despite the tears on
her cheeks, there was a hopefulness in her heart that hadn’t been there for a
really long time. It was the beginnings of something, a small tender shoot
that, if cared for, would grow into a beautiful flower.
It was there, waiting
for her if she would only try.
And despite the words
in her head and the words on the page, she heard the silent roar leak out of
her mouth: Do you not know how strong my
love is?
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