The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8

by Beth Brower

“I have experienced something I can’t quite understand.” Hawkes waited, then, “A state I’ve known.” “What do you do with it?” “I wait on the shore of the mystery to see what the tide will bring.”

I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free. But then I could hear the haunting question that follows, Why am I so changed? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.

I’ve never considered the cello as companion for dawn. One would think to pair it with falling evening, with deepest night. But the instrument did seem to understand the dream state just before waking.

Every morning should begin with a cello.

“I’ve long developed a habit of not growing accustomed to people, Emma Lion, but I have found the last few days ill-fitting without you.”

While I am under no illusions (nor is anyone else of my acquaintance) that I am the ideal execution of what a woman ought to be, I still feel like I’ve tucked my wings against myself too often. Curtailed? Perhaps trimmed?

There has been sovereignty of self in this place—of body, of spirit, of the intangible magic which sews the two together. To shout and run. To lie in tall grasses and watch the wind play the sunlight both true and false. To feel the building threat of rain and watch it crash to earth from the tenuous safety beneath a tree rather than from behind a window. I am, I suppose, satiating a long drought.

My childhood soul has been left too long abandoned.

At times I feel my body has betrayed the girl I was, growing past the lithe limbs hewn in independence. We are to be fit for the purposes of adulthood, I know this. Childhood anticipations are traded with the shouldering of heavier things. But these days, these stones-tossed-in-tall-grass days, have stretched my muscles, recalled past forms, and I am remembering how it is to feel, to fol...