Healing Toward Your New Narrative

Underneath that proud posture, far below Atlassian shoulders and the easy-going armor of an air sign, a soft spirit convalesces, simultaneously willing its wounds to heal while grieving their loss.

Scars aren’t the same. They mean numbness, nerve endings scraped away by an unexpected collision and slow slide down the concrete road of loss. The agony of open wounds means you’re alive, and the memory-triggered sprays of stinging salt only support that theory.

But scars . . . scars are just masses of toughened tissue to run your fingers along, tissue that cannot feel such a caress. Battle scars from a war you never signed up for. Conscripted by love, you fought anyway, sans training, sans leadership–you had no choice but to figure it out on your own as you went along. Story of your life, right? It was not the right time for a new narrative.

You didn’t WANT a new narrative. You wanted to stay in this one–the one that led you to this soul-calming peace you were fighting with every muscle in your grip to hold on to (maybe you had been training for this in some ways). But death is so much stronger than we realize in this tug of war with the thread of a life, and too often Atropos wields her shears, granting him victory as we fly backward–our own inertia no longer impeded by that which we battled to save.

Your spirit tried to cushion your landing, pieces of it shredding off as you skid to a halt. Bloodied and bruised, it crawled back inside your rib cage, desperately seeking solace from your anahatan portal, starving for the healing light that once flowed. But rivers are dammed and light blocked. So your spirit curled up in the darkness of your chest, determined to heal (and inevitably scar) on its own.

And there it still waits. At times threatening loudly to burst through its cage and reclaim its territory, and at others groaning in gratitude for the numbness hiding the painful pull of new, too tight skin and the arthritic ache of a fetal crouch held for far too long. But nerve endings can grow back, snaking just beneath the surface of a soul, creating clouds of lightning and electric tingles. And as the energy continues to crackle and build, your spirit will remember that agony is far from the only indicator of life and numbness turns from protector to antagonist in the space between heartbeats. It will fight its way out of the darkness, tooth and claw, what was once shredded now able to eviscerate all obstacles in its way. It will reach for the light, merge with it, become it. And your spirit will be returned to a blinding, untamed glory, ready to shine on your next narrative.