writing_shadows

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

There, I was a hundred, perhaps a thousand different things for Her.

I was everyone and no one, all at the same time. But I remembered…

I remembered my little flower with her tiny little fingers, my loving husband who used to murmur my name in his sleep, ‘Scarborough Fair’ playing in the restaurant where we had our first kiss, the phone call from the police when my parents flipped their car down the bank on the ice, the smell of orange jasmine by the back door… and a hundred other things besides. I remembered it all so clearly.

But I have promises to keep,

When I got out, I knew exactly where to go. And the house was just as I remembered, only… an old widow lived there now. And swore she’d lived there all her life. And there was no orange jasmine. But then I found them. Found him and her. And she could have been my sister. Two, perhaps three years I thought I’d been gone, and yet she was a woman. And he no longer murmured my name in his sleep. And I thought there would be photos, old wedding gifts, a birth certificate, my mother’s locket passed on to my daughter; I thought there would be things, traces of me, but there weren’t. Not a picture. Not a signature. Not a whisper.

It was as though… I had never even been.

And miles to go before I sleep,

And so, once again, I was no one. I could be anyone. Anyone but myself, apparently. And I took my name. I accepted what I was. I came to terms with it, but it was a private burden; it was mine to keep. And everyone I met from then on was so goddamned determined to treat me like a someone, and I made my throat sore explaining to them that this was not for them to take away. This was mine.

It meant something. It made me Free. Because… if I couldn’t be who I was, I didn’t want to pretend to be someone else – not for any longer than I had to. Not for the rest of my life. I chose to be something, to forge myself anew from the embers of my broken life, to do what I was made to for a purpose that would somehow make amends for what I once had been and maybe, just maybe, save someone else, maybe her, from ever having to go through the same.

And miles to go before I sleep.

But I didn’t realise how much it would sting me when someone finally treated me like I was no one.

Like She did.

Like you just did.