by Aimee Taylor
You are a complicated being, powerful in your presence. I went from one moment not knowing you to another where you lit my edges on fire, your flame creeping closer and closer to my inner being, eating up the words of my story with your slow burn, contours curling under the heat, blown away with the wind as if these pieces of me never existed.
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You toss your sparks around, finding new places to threaten. Little fires everywhere, embers scorch my insides, smoke suffocates me. All I see is black. All I taste is soot.
Uninvited, you are putrid and teasing, relentless and cruel. You enter every sacred space, permeating all parts of me and those I love. Poison can stall you, but you will never quit. Not until you’ve burned through it all. Burned through my guts and my liver, my lungs and my heart, at last, my heart, weary after all these years of housing you.
You will fluster sometimes, but you are clever and cunning. You slink inside me like a serpent, searching for its den. You’ve wrapped yourself around my chest so tightly that when I take a breath, it is you I feed, not me. Slithering through me, over bones and guts and sinew, leaving a trail of destruction at every turn, your fangs always bared, waiting, waiting for that final bite to end all this.
I am tired of trying to maintain hope of your departure. I am tired from putting out your flames. I am tired from having the life squeezed from me, identity soaked in you, isolating me from everything and everyone I’ve ever loved.
And yet, you haven’t got me still. When I feel a gust of air, I will breathe it. When I hear a whisper of hope, I will grasp it. When I see a glimmer of light, I will open my eyes, step to the window, and invite it in.
I will love fiercely. I will laugh loudly. I will live intentionally. All to show you that though you are strong and fierce and powerful, though you are present and relentless and full of life, I am too.
I am, too.
Aimee Taylor is a past retreat participant and co-facilitator of Callanish’s Younger Adult Circle. She is a writer, researcher, musician, mother and more.