My mother once told me a story when I was a little kid.

Her mother had disappeared.

They didn’t know if or when she would come back. I was told she had thrown in the towel on her life as a mother to ten and a wife to an old man. And even as a nine-year-old girl myself, I admired that action. Something about that story told me you don’t have to live in a hell—whether created by your own hands or someone else. Her actions said, Go ahead and save yourself.

I recall the awe in my own mother’s tone, a grasping for her own power at thirty-nine years old. The years her arms held a little baby in a foreign land, a child fathered by a man who ended up not being THE MAN of her dreams—or eventually, mine.

The power of my mother’s mother, the one that declared you don’t have to stay there, lives in me.

I guess that’s my grandmother’s legacy—the power to choose and the power to leave. To admit to yourself, this is killing me. Even if the ten children who came from her own body became collateral damage, there is still beauty in saving yourself for the sake of all of them. I feel her imprinted power of choice still alive in me, and perhaps that’s why I too was able to leave.

It is said that my grandmother eventually returned—relief in the eyes of those she left behind, of course. My mother said it was the only time she ever saw her father cry.

Mary was different upon her return to the home that had once felt like a death sentence—a place where she was never alone. Her skin, her hair, her body—renewed.

I pray a little bit of my grandmother finds you too.

On the days when the hell of your life starts to burn at your feet- Mary comes through- You don’t have to stay here, go ahead and save yourself even for the sake of just you.

When life feels overwhelmingly vast , and your world narrows to your own face, your own life, and your own challenges, go to the edges of the earth—where the ocean meets the sand.

Baptize yourself in its shattering cold, leaving the remnants of your human guise in its saltwater. Bask in the perspective of the limitlessness before you, so grand that its blue ripples can only be measured in time.

Remember that you are one of many who have crawled to this very spot, hands sinking into thousands of dust-like grains, seeking refuge from a shared yet solitary human experience.

You are one of many who have found healing in the medicine of this place—on the edges of the earth, where the ocean meets the sand.

I see you in old Chevy trucks with rust around the edges and in Mexican-colored blankets that cover the seats.

If I’m lucky, I hear you in their engines when I pull up to a stoplight, and for a second—

I’m 14 again, and you’re taking me to school before another grueling graveyard shift at the steel mill. You glance over with a bit of angst and say, “I’m sorry this truck embarrasses you, babe.” We both laugh in that truth.

This is a moment I wish I could return to—to tell you all the things I love about that truck and our early mornings, just us. To tell you that now, from the other side of youth, I see so clearly: there was no place I’d rather be than in that old Chevy truck with you.

I smell you in fresh New Mexico chilies that somehow land on my plate, even when I didn’t order them.

I still linger over every bite of BBQ chicken with a bit of char on the tops during summer evenings.

I touch you every time my hand lands on a page in the Bible.

I meet you at the edge of the shore, where the sand meets the sea and heaven opens for a second—just long enough for humanity to meet their loved ones who reside out in the distance, on the other side. The other side of health issues, traumas, and broken marriages. Where it doesn’t matter how much money one makes.

I watch you in your purity there on the sea, in your own small boat, wrapped up in unimaginable peace.

Here I relax in my skin and for a moment I live here and let myself unravel what that all feels like. I let the sun dance along my neck and shoulders, and we both laugh aloud to see how long it might take before the red sinks in.

No matter—I am here

And when I'm here, I’m a writer and a poet and songstress that has no kids. I am thin without trying, and there are no stretch marks on my skin. I spend my mornings in the trees and my afternoons by the shore. I write of love and pain and the depths of wanting more. I wear shirts that reveal my belly button to the world; insecurities don’t exist here. My friends are Nonna’s I meet in the alleys while they make fresh pastas with hands that look like a grandmother’s I never knew.

And on occasion, I escape to Rome to play and hang around the centuries-old cafés and get lost in small streets, and I let my love affair with Italy completely take over the entirety of me. But I vow never to smoke.

Stench of Me

I can sometimes smell a scent of her. I welcome it even. I let it wash over me for just a moment, like an addict pressing their lips to the bottle again.

The versions of who I was and wasn’t play out in the cinema behind my eyes.

I watch back the years I begged on my knees for better. A better bank account, better clothes, better car, better clients, better home, better relationships, a better body, a better man, and a better life—but never a better me.

Now, when I listen with THESE ears, I hear clearly. A whisper from God always telling me, “Ask me to help make you better.”

I was never asking to be better; I was demanding better be made all around me instead. How can the bones be rotting and still care for the beauty of blessings? How could the smell I was drenched in keep any of the goodness on my wish lists? I was oozing pain and bleeding out on everything. I was not praying to be made better but for God to plant fragrant flowers around the stench of me.

Every good thing must come to an end, they say, and I feel the brewing of this season coming to a close. A season others on the outside would call my single years, yet I call my solo journey to self-discovery. A road that not many in my camp of female friends have ventured down, and if they did, many could not make it past the first lonely, steep climbs up those mountains and even steeper, dark valleys below.

It was my pilgrimage to meeting God within me. The journey to my own womanhood. I was a tribe of one, with only the ancestors in the shadows to lead the way and angels at my sides for protection—protecting me from the wolves of the world and, many times, even myself.

I heard somewhere that ‘how we handle endings is how we handle anything.’ How we show up or show out- avoid and hide, says everything. Character is not built in the welcoming warmth of a beginning but in the various closings of chapters, hard conversations, and season transitions.

The endings filled with bitterness and malice dripping from our lips.The endings draped in longing for a ghost who made us a party of one at every table we sit. The earth-shattering, abrupt endings that shift entire worlds, forcing us to stand at gravesites and contemplate loss at its very core.

I have come to find there is almost a fear of endings in us all. Clinging to the known no matter the conditions we’re dealt. The too-tight shoe we’ve been accustomed to or the lived-in relationship that is slowly killing you. It’s curious how we lock ourselves in for the sake of staying the same and avoiding the evolution of change.

But then again, endings can be a celebration and oftentimes a long exhale. Sadness fades, and anticipation takes its place, for my new beginning is on its way.

The sadness has all but evaporated from my days, and appreciation is what remains.

Last night you came to me in my dream.

I was quite surprised in a way that the mind tries to search for meaning like a grocery store list, each reason collecting another check mark next to the item, knowing that when I get to the bottom there will be nothing left—no explanation to bring me comfort. It felt right and wrong all at once. But it was a dream…

Lies would pour from my mouth if I ever attempted to not acknowledge the goosebumps that ran down my arms from shoulder to index finger, creating in me a tingle of magic when you said the name of your favorite book. I recall being stunned into a mute state, my brain processing far too quickly to formulate any proper sentence. After an uncomfortably long pause, I said, “It’s mine as well.” I knew something, we both did. The body knew it then, and the body knows it now as I welcomed you into my dream last night.

I can’t quite replay it all except the feeling and the one detail that keeps my thoughts hostage all day…

But it’s a dream, and I am pulled from it slowly as I come into consciousness and my eyes begin to flutter open. It’s 5 a.m. I am in my bed alone. You belong to another. But for a night, you were mine, even if I consciously don’t understand why.

If one more person reminds me of my strength I think I will scream out in unadulterated aching shrills until it all pours out of me and topples onto every last one of them. I will muster the last ounces of my strength to vomit the very words they want to pin me to, “Here, here is all my strength”.

It seems I was born strong all 10lbs of me landed here in some packaged labeled “strength”. Every muscle on my 5’8 frame is evidence and fact that I am still here standing through insurmountable upheavals to prove it. Yes, you are strong, my body concedes.

But can I be more?

Can I also be fragile and gentle and vulnerable and at times frail and able to fall apart like other women do

Can you look at me with concern and empathy and not just wide eyed admiration and soft echos of unspoken envy

Can I be more than the valleys I’ve trudged through? More than the mountains I’ve climbed and the steep peaks I’ve made it to? More than the blistering storms i’ve weathered? More than The bleeding heart I’ve miraculously mended whole again and again and yet again.

Can I be more than this strength category you’ve placed me in crowing me in the glory of obstacles overcome?

Can I be more than your strong friend?

We didn’t share physical things. My precious heirloom only time. 378 days of knowing truth but that truth not bringing us closer in the end. I came in like a savior to close the deal and wrap up loose ends. Represented Hail Marys as the clock of time ticked down on the hands of her life. Possession’s of the flesh being secretly sized up amongst the direct blood line. There I stand in the aftermath hand in hand with time. printed images and hand written letters reeking of someone else’s heirloom a cedar box to hold all the pieces of a life suffocated in silence. They all belong to a woman I will never know, like they know. I am the observe of a life that touched so many- they say. I remain an outsider hand in hand with time.

In my adulthood I collected strangers like a tourist collects seashells on every beach they are lucky enough to step foot on. Searching out all the unique ones along the shoreline, holding out for the sparkling shells that glimmer just right when the sunbeam hits its alabaster insides. Carefully wrapping the shell in a used tshirt so tightly I was sure no damage would ensue on the voyage home. There in my home, they would be placed in a unique position, adding to the character of that wall or shelf. Each shell representing a feeling of a place that allowed me to feel less alone and more at one with others. I was collecting friends now you see, but this time if I left a place they would still come with me, unlike the 16 years of my youth that saw friends sink away like quicksand in my memories as we fled to our next home town. But here on this island I was collecting myself and not collecting strangers. I’m collecting the little fragments of my earliest memories under the shade of the palms. I am collecting pieces of the story as I baptize myself in the sea. Pieces of my past. Pieces of a Father who in reality never left. Pieces of a Mother who lied as often as the TSA guard instructed the long airport line to “keep it moving, people”. We sit by the sea. Venus energy between us. Three women. Then a fourth. All who have experienced motherhood in some way, shape or form. Something about this moment feels sacred. Rock meets the sea. We all meet in a form of sisterhood we’re unconsciously aware of. Wombs have felt the heaviness and responsibility of life. Each knowing the creation that lives within and the one that spills over onto pages.

It’s there she ask’s me to ask myself what will this story, my story, accomplished. I am speechless for once. It’s like I’m the thick lava rock I sit upon and her question is an abrupt shockingly cold Mediterranean sea wave, crashing into me, carrying with it all the ancestors that ever swam in those waters. It’s thick. Her question, like the sea spanned out in front of us, filled with so much more than what the naked eye can see nor the human ear can hear. It’s a question that only the soul can hear and only the soul can answer. Here I collect myself. Here I do not collect strangers.