“Forget The World To Find Us”
Growing pines
Let your hand find mine warm
Say goodbye
To the life that we scorned
Find every blade of grass a different shade of green
Or thorn
A healing friend
Maples Sigh
From the ever-changing winds
Birds will fly
To find home for their kin
The colors of the sunset will paint the story
that Our skin
Has yet to tell
Will you go?
Reap our sow?
And we’ll
Grow our garden’s flowers
Will you go?
Even though
We will
Lose our counted hours
Leave our broken palace
Forget the world
To find us
I got my first tattoo on Wednesday. It’s one of those things I had always thought I’d get but never felt there was a good enough reason, like buying that fancy dress, booking that trip to Cali, starting that blog. And then came a reason I didn’t like at all. I wanted to return it immediately. “Never mind, I don’t need it; I’m good. I can do without the clothes, the trips, the ink. I’ll give you the dreams, God; you take the cancer, okay? Thanks, but no thanks.”
But no matter how deep I dug my feet, no matter how low I sank my soles, they still lugged me to that first chemo appointment. I still watched them poke him red and take his taste away. I still stayed secretly praying that it would suddenly end. But it didn’t, and we waded through, week by week, hour by hour.
So we made our plans to dream in our nightmare, to borrow strength from our future memories. We made our trip to Cali, building our travel bus, and we bought those fancy clothes, wrapped in a love we hadn’t previously known. He leaned over, in a room void of color, to say, “you should start that blog and finish your book,”
And I got my first tattoo on Wednesday— a depiction of his port with his hand-drawn hearts as the access points.