threeplusfire: (Default)
three ([personal profile] threeplusfire) wrote2000-12-21 06:37 pm

scars like silver light

"One day, maybe one day." She's singing in my head, and I'm watching things happen outside of me, like the world goes by on a screen... The movie of my life is finally getting a good soundtrack. The actors are getting better too. Someone still has to figure out where this story is going.

I know. Used to listen to my headphones all the times, hidden in my ears under my hair, under my shirt. The sound always in the background, so I could believe that none of it was real, that I was walking across a movie screen in Berlin, and the story was going to work out okay. Walking through that crowd, down the stairs and a voice was screaming in my head. All the pain for all the world to see if you had looked underneath the surface.

I knew how to lie, how to hide. It was so easy. But I broke the screen, one violent act that was still cinematic in its intensity and the dreamy slowness.

I am alive, alive, alive, so brutally alive. Years before I realized that I hadn't died that day.

I am alive. Still hard to say that to myself, this thing that everyone takes for granted. I look at my hands, breathe and feel the air on my skin. I am alive. I don't have the words in any of the three languages I know to describe that feeling. To know that I almost ceased to be, that the ambulance skidded on the ice, that I stopped breathing, that I laid a week in a coma and no one knew where I was.... and here I am now. with everything I have, this life.

There is so much inside me that finally feels like it's beginning to heal. Becoming silvery scars, the record of violence and survival. The wounds so deep I never thought they would heal are closing. I can forgive them, and even myself sometimes...

Sound crashes down like rain, my thoughts move backwards in time and for a moment I am sixteen years old again, scared and my hand shakes on the glass.... but I speak, out loud and the silence hangs back and I can see the look in those eyes.

Lately I can feel the process of change in me. Like I'm growing up, becoming that girl I never believed could exist. For the first time there is light in me, and I feel it radiate like a cry, light like fire like music shot through with sunshine and color the sound without end high over my head like the sky....