My ghosts...

Something I wrote as a model for my students. The goal was descriptive writing, using sensory detail, metaphor, and simile, all mashed together illustrating one of the steps in an epic hero's journey. Now, some of it may be corny (or undeveloped, at the very least), but it deals with some real things. Things that have not fully happened yet. Things that should happen if I'm ever going to let go and move on...
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My green Honda civic crawls to a halt and I yank the emergency break a little too hard.

Just breathe, Tina, I have to remind myself.

My eyes are pinched shut and my fists grip the wheel. I fumble through my purse, searching for my Burt’s Bees and for an extra moment before the inevitable. To my right, on the passenger seat where loved ones should sit, is the dried rose—once a deep, pulsing blood red, but now a shriveled leaf brown—the one Mom and Dad saved from the funeral that I couldn’t attend. With a trembling hand, I bring the flower to my nose. It smells like autumn leaves, fallen to the ground, dead, kicked around, forgotten.

I step out of my car and slam the door. The crisp, cool October wind whips into my body, and sends my hair flying. I lift my eyes and, through blurred vision, I see the stones sitting there, an army of them, in rank, at attention, eternally patient—waiting for me. Well, at least one of them is.

It’s been entirely too long, I think, and I feel my feet pulling the rest of me forward, as if they know I can’t do it on my own.

Amidst my indecision, I feel a flurry of wings above my head, as a dove, a perfect dove, leads me to her stone, to the stone. The bird lands and waits. My feet, now like lead, finish the journey for me.

And there it is: In loving memory—Deborah O’Briant.

I drop to my knees. A solitary tear rolls down my cheek and tries to run away from the unfinished hurt in my heart. The fibers there remain unhealed. The scab there threatens to rip away any progress I’ve made trying to forget and forgive this woman, this woman’s husband, this woman’s child, and this woman’s niece—me. And I sit there, fierce in my determination to keep the scab intact, to finally move past this grief. Three years have passed and this is my first visit to her grave. My mouth is bitter with guilt.

Coo, coo…I look up. The dove cocks her head knowingly, as if she knows me.

Coo, coo…she repeats, and I close my eyes. The wind is gentle now; it has lost its bite. It circles me, dries my tears, and calms my racing heart.

My skin tingles, and I feel her here. My aunt, she’s here.  But it’s not just her.  It is her and it is everyone else buried under the ground.  It is the dead and it is the living.  It is everything visible and invisible.  It is the feeling we have around us every day, but we rarely notice.  It is the breath of fresh air as we leave a crowded space.  It is the ever-present knowing, the essence of everything and nothing. 

My skin tingles with the feeling of that something we can always count on, like a mother’s touch or a lover’s kiss.  Like a shiver and a sigh.  Like the longing and the loss.  Like the comfort found cuddling in a down blanket or spooning with your dog. 

My skin tingles, and I wake up.  I start to remember, to realize all of the things I forgot. 

It’s time to stop this, Tina. I don’t just hear these words.  I feel them seeping through the pores of my skin.

Now is the time for forgiveness, the feeling tells me.  Remember that I love you and that I’ll always be with you, but let me go.

Let this go.

The dove swoops down, takes the dried blossom that has fallen from my hand to the brown grass, takes one last look at me, and flies away.

She’s right. It’s time to let this go.

I take a long, deep breath.

This time, though, I don’t have to remind myself to do it.