…and then there are days, and nights sometimes, where healing, is lying down on my yoga mat in a dark room and going back,

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back, as far as the child within me wants to go, and i let her decide where we stop and linger for a bit. i have learned to trust her with this most important thing, and

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sometimes we walk through my father’s vegetable garden and he is there and the sun is hot on my skin and the cicadas are shrill in the heat of the afternoon, but we are happy and content and i ask him the secret to growing strawberries that are sweet like syrup and how-do-i-know-just-when-the-corn-is-ready-to-be-picked, and show me how to read the clouds that gather over the karoo landscape, and he tells me all the hidden things a gardener needs to know, and it is like the rain that falls from a broken cloud and floods the dry earth.

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but sometimes, we stop where words are like acid and my skin burns and my heart melts like lead over a hot flame and then it cools into a different shape, and all i can do is stand there with my hand on her shoulder — the child who i once was, and i tell her that it’s ok, it’s ok, you are going to be ok, just you wait and see.

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…and please let these words fall off your skin, please don’t let them cling, and yes, there is pain and it is not just your heart that hurts, his does too, but he does not know how to undo the deep tracks left in those new fields, and pain that is given no name, loves to marry anger and none of this is your fault, and .

it’s ok to let the tears fall, even now, let them water your skin, and your bones, and the dry earth of your heart and it is never too late to let them come, and just you wait, you will see.

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it will all be ok.

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and then we come back and we hug and say goodbye, for a while, this is hard work — too hard for every day, and she leaves quietly and i get up and read bedtime stories to a heart that looks at me with love, and i get to kiss a soft boy-cheek goodnight, and somehow,

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somehow, it is all ok, and somewhere i can hear her laugh.

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— when she takes me back.

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© Liezel Graham 2019.

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Photograph Pixabay.