You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

The Finder didn’t lose the future, only her knowledge about it. She lost the narrative. The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot.

What I didn’t say: I thought about dying all the time. Or, not dying, but disappearing. Poof. I didn’t want to die, not really, but I wanted relief. I wanted to stop feeling what I was feeling.

Or: I wanted my husband back, and I wanted the stranger he’d become to disappear.

Audre Lorde that reads “I am who I am, doing what I came to do.”

What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you. It can make you feel like you’re choking, like you can’t take a full breath.

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for,

have woven a parachute out of everything broken… —William