After the Flood

Lately I’ve been feeling grateful in embarrassingly domestic ways.

Like standing in my kitchen at midnight eating strawberries over the sink
while some melancholic woman sings in the background
and realizing I no longer fantasize about disappearing every other Tuesday.

My depression is healing.

No need to panic.
This was never really a glamorous kind of suffering anyway.

It mostly involved crying at completely random TV scenes,
crying so hard it felt like someone would eventually have to scrape me off the floor
the way people scrape old gum out of carpets.

Very elegant behavior from me.

In reality, healing is much less cinematic than suffering.

It looks like answering texts again.
Doing yoga before my nervous system files a formal complaint.
Making future travel plans without secretly believing I’ll ruin them somehow.
Buying good olive oil because apparently I’m a woman who plans to stay alive now.

There was a time when sadness felt intelligent to me.

I trusted melancholia more than happiness.
If something hurt, I thought it must be important.

Meanwhile my serotonin was somewhere face down in a parking lot.

Now life feels different.

Not easier. Just less personal.

People still disappoint me constantly.

Some vanish the second intimacy enters the room.
Some are emotionally available only between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m.
Some would rather die than communicate directly.

May God bless heterosexuality. What a terrifying little concept.

And yet.

There are still beautiful things everywhere.

Beautiful people.
Beautiful chaos.
Beautiful conversations that accidentally become memories.
Beautiful strangers making eye contact like they know something about you.
Beautiful songs leaking out of passing cars at red lights.
Beautiful women rebuilding themselves in bathroom mirrors at midnight.

Life is still beautiful to me.

Ridiculously beautiful.

If you can still say that after everything that has happened to you,
congratulations.

Your soul survived.

My sisters visited recently and the apartment became loud in the healthiest way possible.

Emotionally very healing.
For our livers, significantly less inspiring.

Someone was always hungry.
Someone was always telling a story.
There were glasses everywhere, bags exploded onto the floor,
half-finished conversations floating room to room.

The kind of mess that makes loneliness leave through the back door.

And my mother…

God.

Maybe one of the strangest parts of growing up
is realizing your mother is just a woman
who also had her heart broken before.

We barely fight anymore.

Not because one of us finally won.
Just because love stopped wearing armor in our conversations.

Now she tells me what she cooked that day
like it’s breaking news.

I tell her whether it rained.

Somehow this has become enough.

The heart knows the truth long before the mind catches up anyway.

Mine certainly did.

I know this much about myself now:

if I don’t create something from pain, the pain starts furnishing the apartment.

So I write.
I move.
I make art out of devastation before devastation starts getting too comfortable inside me.

Some people become bitter.

I almost became a poet instead.

Equally dangerous.

And strangely, creating gives me a healthier high than chaos ever did.

Yoga helps.

Meditation too, when I actually commit to it instead of acting spiritually evolved for three business days and disappearing again.

There’s also something deeply healing about:

clean sheets,
summer evenings,
being understood immediately,
and looking at yourself one day and realizing:

oh.

I speak to myself kindly now.

Ten years ago I was the queen of emotional catastrophe.

Every ending felt biblical.
Every man became a metaphor.
Every inconvenience deserved a Lana Del Rey soundtrack.

Now I look back at certain heartbreaks
the way people look back at apartments with terrible plumbing.

Emotionally significant at the time.
Absolutely not sustainable.

And thank God I can still love.

Thank God I can still look someone in the eyes
and say “I love you” without shame.

Because the heart knows.

It always knows.

And mine still chooses love,
still chooses art,
still chooses beauty.

Even after all the people
who treated tenderness like weakness.

Even after all the nights
I thought I would never feel light again.

There’s something almost absurd about it, really.

The fact that after everything,
a pretty sky can still ruin my entire emotional stability.

I still romanticize grocery shopping when the right song comes on.
Still get emotional over candlelight, airports, jazz, beautiful strangers, fresh bread, summer air through open windows.

As if the world never fully succeeded
at convincing me to become hard.

And maybe that’s enough for a lifetime.

To leave this world still capable of wonder.