Survival is Not Healing

though it might look that way

Survival is Not Healing

Years later,
she pronounces herself healed.
I have no work to do, she says, convinced,
eyes sparkling hard like chainmail.

Her words are flat packages
delivering earnest wisdom to others;
her serious kindness soothes.
She’s always been the one with answers,

freely offered, and since
old wounds no longer ooze
and broad smiles are possible now,
she must be right.

We both know the saga
of what life did to her, with what cruelties,
but that was so long ago, so very long,
and time heals all, does it not?

I remember a girl
whose face danced with mischief,
whose laughter pealed free

because trust in herself
had not been strangled
by doubt or regret

and her future
rolled out before her like
an open, sun-touched field.

I miss that girl.

The passage of time
does not constitute a cure, friend;
survival is not healing. I know,

for I too
have carried the weight
of unwanted souvenir stones
engraved with epithets,

shunted into darkness
that bleeds away dreams,
fitted into a fortress
I never planned to build.

Will she hear me
if I talk of freedom through fire,
that blessed element
of transformation,

a furnace
called forgiveness
that cracks apart
even the densest of stones?

She might.

It probably depends, doesn’t it,
on nothing I can predict: the hour
she reads this; the song in her mind;
and whether she misses that girl

as much as I do.

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xox
M