After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

His eyes were tender and calm, like an open palm stretched out for me to take. I also saw regret in him, but a kind of half regret. The kind of regret you have when you feel bad about something, but not bad enough to stop doing it.

I knew I hated him too much to not still love him.

These two impulses—to be close to them and to hold them at arm’s length—kept rubbing against each other, putting me on edge.

Each mother is different except in the ways she is broken, right to the marrow; even the softest parts can crumble.

I thought of how birth is only the beginning of giving life, maybe the smallest part of giving life, like a seed that still needs the sun and soil, needs so much to still blossom.

Life can’t exist without fighting disorder.”

Wow

I had other, darker things in me that turned my decisions. My rage and my fear. They got all mixed up with my love and I couldn’t separate them. They were like the sky when it melts into the sea, how you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends.

she’s busy breaking herself. The world will break you, but it’s when you break yourself that you feel you really can’t heal.”

Letting him in was giving in to the wrong impulse, feeding longing that needed to be squelched.

I could feel him

even in my blood, as if he inhabited me just by looking at me.

“It’s like my heart’s been chipped and chipped away.” The way waves change the shape of a rock, beating it into something new.

Hope would never come knocking on your door. You had to claw your way toward it, rip it out of the cracks of your loss where it poked out like some weed, and cling to it.

I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.