I’ve lost forty pounds since Christmas Eve. A few have found their way back to my tummy, my hips in the last few weeks. I’m not discouraged. I have found the way of peace. Release will come.
::
She gripped my arm, my hand, studying my ink. “I’m having them removed,” I said. “No! Por que? They make you look…” she stopped, searching for the English word. “…interesting.”
‘Different’ was the word I used. ‘Mysterious.’ I was the girl with tattoos. I was the girl with dreadlocks and feathers in her hair. I was the girl with the nose ring, the lip ring. I couldn’t bear the truth. I could be anything but the fat girl. I could be anything but myself.
What a difference love makes.
“She was heavy, like wet roses.”—Caitlin Moran
I am still finding my voice after a summer, a year, and more years of unexpected transformations. “Winter is past,” I wrote softly in twenty sixteen. “Flowers appear on the earth.”
So, too, they appeared in my spirit and soul.
I open my mouth with the old language, the ancient one, but upon my lips it is new. I didn’t know old could become new, but dead comes to life, in nature and in the born again, so it is simple, really. I am a Christian, without the mystic. At one time I could not say one without the other. At one time I could say nothing at all.
::
At one time the Word said into darkness: “Let there be light.” And it was so.
It is so. My body is changing. I am cloaked in quietness.
—hillary m.
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