“I don’t care if the sun don’t shine. I don’t care if nothin’ is mine.”

So it was that I went inside. I did it fastidiously. I slowly gathered my things and planned my exit carefully. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. I know you understand such a desire.

It had just begun to hurt too much. There is listening and then there is knowing and sometimes, the knowing won’t turn off. It streams endlessly, hounds you, turns up in the un-likeliest of places. And the worst of it is that the knowing is just a feeling, albeit a persistent one. It is not words. Words can be challenged. They can be stared down. They can be picked apart. But a feeling renders you helpless. A feeling enters you and stays as long as it wishes. It bangs around and robs you of sleep and turns your stomach and just for fun, takes your ability to laugh and feel genuine joy. Your guard must always be firmly in place and, because of this, you will start to doubt everyone and everything. It is insidious and exhausting and unfair and it simply is.

So it was that I went underground. I was less stealthy in this, I admit. My strength having been drawn out, tested to its limits, I was less than and it showed in the smallest of ways. Were you not so perceptive, were you not always yourself on the lookout for something amiss, I might have escaped un-noticed. As it was, you felt me go, but were possibly too afraid to ask me where.

So it was that I had a long sleep. It was necessary. It was impossible for even me to go on in that state. I had been brought to the brink. I had made my choice and the only path out was complete follow through. I would bide my time beneath the surface of things. I would gather my energy. I would emerge when the time was right. I couldn’t begin to guess when that might be. Instead, I put myself in primal mode. I subsisted on bare essentials. I did not know if I were capable of bending, of yielding, only of surviving. I felt as though I had given until I had been emptied and having felt laid bare, I rested, fallow and quiet and still.

So it was that I relinquished you. I stopped driving. I stopped hoping. There was nothing else for it but to let go and so, I did. And what started as sadness and fear became something else entirely. It became warming earth. It became unfurled buds. It became bird song. It became possibility, rebirth, a Spring to bring me back above ground.

“The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.”

Be Good Tanyas – ‘The Littlest Birds’

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[editor's note]

anyone who’s read Tara over the past year’s worth of posts knows how much of a treat this has been.

so here’s to the woman who’s not afraid to laugh, to cry, to shout out… and to write it all down for the rest of us.

you got moxy, kid. thanks for having us along for the ride[s].