threehundredandsixtyfive

 I looked out the window that day thinking that this was the hardest it would get - the wiping away of my existence in that city. Tears slipped, slick on a face already tired from grief. 

I rubbed my body down with isopropyl alcohol that night, sterilized, cauterized, steeling away. I went to bed.

I did not know about what would come next. Did not know that by the end of the month, there would be tractor-trailers brimming with death parked in the gridlines of that home. that this would bring me me to my knees. Did not know that I would watch the numbers of lives and the sprouts in my garden grow and climb in unison: higher, higher, higher.  I could not have known how much it would hurt, to know bodies as things to be feared. To have a body that was feared.

How lonely the thoughts, spilling, sputtering out of lips so burdened with words, ragged with breath. Rug burns and eyes swollen and vision blurry and kneeling so long, and dizzy when I stood. I held fallen dreams and silent hopes in hands so tired. I watched the day change from morning to noontime to evening, the season change from spring to summer to fall, all with my back pressed against the same spot on my front lawn. 

I did not know then. Perhaps I do not know now. Holding this sacred grief, this full-bellied, swooning sadness, waiting for the phoenix rising. From ashes, from dust. How bitter and brutal the blossoming, this Becoming has been. 

And like yesterday, and all the days before, the Maker of the Cosmos holds this broken body, dizzy with grief, riddled with hope, closer, still. 

And I place a marker in the sand. 

And write simply: three-hundred-and-sixty-five.