Transitions

Pain swirled around with the ice in my coke as I stirred.  I hadn’t ordered it to drink, just to stir; the bubbles were known to get inside of me and pop--each little bubble a bullet, each pop an explosion, each motion puncturing my heart.

Moving on didn’t mean packing up cardboard boxes.  Moving on meant closing doors.  It meant lifting my leaden arm towards the handle, forcing my fingers to close around the metal knob, willing my arm to force the door shut.  

I don’t know if I can pinpoint that moment when it didn’t matter anymore.  When my hands felt like my own again, when my lungs could expand without bursting into pieces, and when each room I stepped into stopped smelling like tears.

When freedom came to me in a shower of colored glass; every day things became kaleidoscope shapes and I was a balloon barely anchored to the ground.  When I ran faster than the wind through the grass, leapt higher than the rustling leaves at the top of the tree, and looked at the moon and held it in my eyes, cupped the smooth, pale shape, and knew it for the first time.

And when I could look at photographs of you without those little soda-pop explosions in my chest.