Night Sky

I am alone in my kitchen when the familiar notes of a song stop me in my tracks. I stand there for a while, eyes closed, wrapping my arms around my frame. I sway just slightly as the strings of the violin enter the room. They dance like water deep within my soul.

Outside my window the sun gifts the sky purple, and my heart, painted with all the colors, hums softly to the melody.

For tonight, in the hazy twilight, my feet are rooted on my kitchen floor, but my mind has suddenly floated off into a memory. Without asking for permission it takes me back to another night where I lost a piece of myself on a lonely black strip of pavement.

The season that holds that memory will forever be etched with unfathomable pain. More than I ever knew possible. The kind where breath is unnatural and shoulders sag beneath the weight of it and the light goes out behind the eyes for a little while.

That night I had set out to do one of the few habitual things that keeps me centered, put my feet on the pavement.

The sun fell and dark sighed a slow entrance. I walked until I turned the corner to see my home in a fuzzy distant view. With each step my legs surprised me by becoming heavier and heavier until the weight of all of it finally leveled me.

Slowly, under the cover of night, I dropped one limb at a time, until I lay flat on my back under that night sky, and all that pain found her way out. It always does, doesn’t it?

Dark shattered over me like pieces of broken glass, suffocating, and the pavement became a sharp bed on my fragile skin. The sky was now painted in hazy, blurred lines of black and smoke. The trees tall above me faded like water colors into the night sky, and my tears felt like they would never stop as they burned a lazy river into the asphalt.

I lay there breaking and hidden as time lost herself for a little while, until finally, I turned my head just enough to catch the light burning through my oversized kitchen window. The truest of light in the dark. Through that giant piece of glass I saw my babies safe and sound, and slowly, breath found me again.

That pale light resurrecting strength I didn’t think I had left.

In reverse order, I climbed slowly, limb by limb, until my feet were the only thing still touching that crooked road. I wiped the tears and hid the pain before I walked into the place where the only remaining heart of me waited patiently for me to return.

And slowly, I did.

For pain has a way of softening and blocks of healing are sometimes laid on hidden black topped roads.

But the best part of this story?

The best part is that one night much later I laid on that same strip of pavement once again, except this time it was sandwiched between my babies as I wrapped them in my arms. We lay together under the canopy of the night sky and admired her gift of light, and my heart rooted herself in a smile.

My goodness, how life can be so painful and so beautiful. And how that night sky catches it all.

~Kalan