After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

CHILDREN THINK WE make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.

It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought.

When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.

I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be.

“You know what happens to kids who are abandoned? Who don’t believe they’re worth anyone staying around? It changes how you see yourself. Everyone else is walking around fine and it’s like you have a fucking hole in your chest and the whole world can reach in and touch anything in you. You have no armor. You never feel safe.

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.

“I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.”

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

From the water we came and to the water we will return, our lungs always hungering for air, but our hearts beating like waves.

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.