Still Here, Still Her

She had forgotten the sound of her own laugh, that bright, unguarded thing that used to spill from her like water bursting over the falls.

Twenty years is a long time to learn the art of walking on eggshells, to mistake silence for peace and smallness for safety.

He had a talent for it, the slow and careful work of destruction, never all at once, but in small measures and careful doses.

Like the way a shoreline loses itself to the sea so gradually you almost don't notice until you look down one day and find you are standing on someone else's ground.

She left in autumn. The papers signed, the house divided, a life unwound into cardboard boxes and the brutal reality of starting over at forty-one.

The first year was a timid archaeology dig, constantly sifting through the rubble of herself, finding a shard here, a fragment there, evidence that she had existed before him.

That the woman who danced barefoot in the kitchen and cried at beer commercials and dog adoption videos at midnight and songs she'd heard a thousand times that hit differently on the thousand-and-first.

The woman that kept her paintings stacked against the walls, her notebooks in a pile beside the bed, proof of an interior life that had always been worth something, no matter what he said, had not been entirely abandoned.

The second year she made things, a canvas propped against the kitchen window, notebooks filled with lines that didn't have to justify themselves to anyone, colors she mixed just to see what would happen.

Words she wrote at her own table in her own time, as if she were making a quiet argument to the world…I am still capable of making something beautiful. I am still capable of being heard.

The brushes he had called a waste of time drank color again. The stories he had smirked at found their way onto the page, one true sentence at a time.

And somewhere in the third year, not on any remarkable morning, not with trumpets, but gently, like light filling a room whose curtains have simply been opened, she came back.

She started singing in the car again. She laughed so hard at dinner that she snorted, and the table around her laughed. She did not apologize or make herself small or scan anyone's face for permission.

She is not the woman she was before him. That woman is gone, and honestly, she's made her peace with that.

In her place is someone built on harder-won ground, someone who knows her own name, someone who has walked through the quiet violence of being gradually unloved into nothing…

And came out the other side hungry, grateful, beautifully, defiantly here.