Never listen when they tell you she's broken because she's not.

(Dear reader, this post isn't for you, it's for me. So please don't send me hatemail today. That is all.)

New like a baby
Lost like a prayer
The sky was your playground
But the cold ground was your bed
Poor stargazer
She's got no tears in her eyes
Smooth like whisper
She knows that love heals all wounds with time
Now it seems like too much love
Is never enough,
you better seek out another road
'cause this one has ended abrupt,
say hello to heaven

It's a sort of cinnamon-sugar-dipped finger day, a discard the striped tights for bare legs day, a day where you squint when you first open the curtains and a day to listen to very old and much beloved music.

It's a day for fresh-squeezed beginnings and toasted dreams.

It's making me smile. I have four days to go before I get on a plane and get to see the brown eyes that have taken over my thoughts permanently and four days to begin to make my peace with the blue eyes I'm going to leave behind. And it all feels rather abrupt and final and like a relief with an undercurrent of excited recklessness.

Everyone has always said that time heals, leaving us to hope and assume and guess that it's going to be gradual and painless and as slow as molasses, that we can watch and gauge progress, a high water mark that will recede visibly and we can draw lines and marvel at the change.

It doesn't work like that. It's fast but it's painful and obvious. One minute you're walking down a familiar path, breath choked in your throat, eyes misted over, fumbling along hoping you don't trip and get sucked into the emotional quicksand you've been out-walking like the living dead for months and years and days and nights, oh those endless nights and then there's that switch that gets flicked and in a flash of terrible, blinding pain, everything is gone.

Gone.

The road beneath my feet is firm and dry and stable. My green eyes are clear and I can see. I can take a deep breath and suck it far down into my lungs. I can let go of a hand for just a moment and it doesn't scare me to do so.

Some warning would have been nice but I didn't get it and that's okay too because I'm pretty sure I won't fall because I risked a look back over my shoulder and the quicksand pool was gone and the emotional bounty on my soul has been rescinded and oh, I need another deep breath.

So unexpected and yet so welcome too.

I've said before I have no user manual, and that grief has no roadmap. I've challenged everyone I have ever met to prove to me that my head was going to fit their mold, that my behavior would follow their predictions, that my heart would make sense.

I've proven them all wrong, not wrong in their studies or in their theories, just wrong in that not everyone can find comfort in some set of stages or group of behaviors or chain of feelings. That if you feel alone and you don't seem to fit and experts run out of answers and friends run out of patience and you run out of strength that it doesn't make you a bad person or a crazy person or a person who can't be helped.

It just makes you you.

Exactly who you're supposed to be.

Visibly and invisibly different.

Beautiful, beautiful me.