Jack’s Laugh

 I haven’t felt this kind of contentment since I was nineteen. The walls I began creating as a child were nearly impenetrable so the years of trauma had not yet broken through them. I could lie in the grass and sway with the breeze without a care. The possibilities were endless and open. I felt limitless. 

I’m not sure if it is the start of Spring, the years of therapy, or the alcohol that has brought back the sense of peace in my body and heart today. This time with full awareness of the cause and effects of my past but without the need for self destructive love seeking. 

The grief is still there like a new scar that threatens to re-open but I can look at it with a loving fondness like flipping through old photographs. His voice plays in my head like an old record and I laugh or cry depending on the moment. Today I smile as I look at the trees and birds, my heart full of memories and gratitude. The other night my heart overflowed with despair and longing, regret so heavy I couldn’t stand or speak. Today I vow to dance with the sea and sew my heart with future memories.  

When I was fifteen I fell in love so hard and fast and fully that I would never be the same. I took from him all of the love I hadn’t received since I was a child and saturated him with all the love I had stored inside of me. I knew it once before but had lost it and unconsciously longed to return to the place of being fully known and understood. My craving for validation and oneness knew no bounds and we held nothing back. This lead to a heartbreak so complete and vast that I couldn’t help but be radicalized and reborn. 

I’ve stumbled through the years leaping blindly from one stepping stone to another, never fully knowing where they lead or why. Like The Fool, full of potential on another journey leading to peril or indispensable wisdom. Never knowing which it will be at the start and learning that even the perilous path is full of wisdom. 

You might wonder who I am. I’ve asked myself that as long as I have memories. I can start with my name and where I grew up, a small rural town with nothing much nearby. In a house full of loving but complicated people like most of us. The house is as much a character as any of them. It belonged to my great great grandparents and was eventually passed down to my mother. It was big and full of adventure and hope, yellow and faded, and on a big corner lot. The house on Walnut street held me like a grandmother herself. She gave me comfort and stability, a sense of freedom and independence within my bedroom. But I also knew that she held secrets, there was a mysteriousness in her walls and perhaps ghosts. I never saw them but sometimes sensed another presence. Maybe it was the house herself just saying “Hello, don’t forget about me” if I strayed too far for too long. 

I did abandon her and her fate was sadder than I could have imagined. Burned, like a witch at the stake and her grave is now a huge empty dirt lot playground for drunks. My psyche still wanders from room to room and plays games in the backyard. I don’t know if she remembers me but if she could I think she would remember the first time I laughed or cried, the first steps I took, my father punching the mirror and shattering our family; the emptiness for two years after my mother’s accident; and my return to the safe haven of my bedroom where I was free to be me, whoever that was. My boyfriends and our fucking and fighting. My friends and cat family. My mom’s drunken falling and crawling on the floor. The laughter of the three of us. Jack’s laugh. And his stories. The stories even I don’t fully remember I regret to say. 

I wonder if houses continue in the spiritual realms after their passing. If we imbued them with a soul through our presence and emotions. Through our ancestry, blood, sweat, tears and all. She continues to haunt my dreams and I remember every detail. Sometimes I know it is only a dream, that she is no longer there physically. There is a sort of peace that it really doesn’t matter because her walls, trees, and front porch, everything is all exactly the same. Sometimes more beautiful, like in her prime. I wonder what she was like when my great grandparents and their family lived there-or even before she knew any of us.