Thursday, March 16, 2017

Ember and Ash

Today I remembered dance. I felt the movements echo within my muscles, reawakening energy that has laid dormant, even afraid. 

It's been nearly half a year since I felt myself begin to disintegrate. Like watching the embers of a dying fire drift out into the air, I saw the remnants of who I had been rise and vanish before my eyes. Something hidden had been punctured through the actions of another, releasing the agony of the ghosts of my former selves out into the blistering light. 

It has not been a swift purge. No sudden flash igniting the remains of a long dead past, but a slow and steady burn. Charring me from the inside out and scorching against the ragged marks of nails scratched from within, desperately seeking liberation from the entombment of my darkest memories. 

Though the initial cremation is ending, I now face the healing of the raw and new self coming into being. The time for mourning the old has passed, gone away in the ashes and tears that littered the path behind me. 

I may remain dormant for some time still; safely encased as I am reintroduced to my world as it is now, and not as it was then. Likewise, this time granted to me by the very virtue of having survived this transformation offers the space to reacquaint myself with who I am now, out from under the shadow of who I was then. 

Memories can echo from bone just as easily as they can from sight or smell. As they rise like smoke from a fire long gone, it is only natural to acknowledge the beauty as well as the despair that may emerge in these final breaths. Like smoke, it does not do to inhale these spectres, and so as they rise I watch them go. The wonderful, and the ghastly. 

Now as I feel a new energy striking a spark somewhere within the confines of my sanctuary, my muscles reawaken in memory. My steps may not be what they had been, and my dance may form from the reverberation of those that came before it, but I can feel music coursing through me again, and like ashes to a wind, I must move with it. 

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