Our souls are separate from our stories. Our hearts are never as sequential, as chapped, as chaptered, as stowed safe and silent in the peppery paper that holds our growing truth.
We are nesting dolls.
Each version I’ve ever called by name sits soft inside the next. When an innermost part has something to share that needs to be heard, I must pry open my multitudes, layer by painful layer — until I can echo the achingly unanswered wails of that rosy-cheeked babe, fold her in my palms, and pray.
Unlike the other conversations I so often share — with the steam off my morning coffee, or the hawks over the highway, or some other solitary specter of God — the words that I whisper now are no tender gauze of gardens to come.
Instead, I find my voice dripping in salted buttercream, and maple blood in the tapping tin, and beeswax kissed by wild clover honey. I breathe out balms to soothe the tender bruises gone by — gently handed to the divine inside her, from the divine inside me, which is the same as hers, inside us, inside you —
Which is only to say, I speak aloud the light she needed to know.