Hot Dirt

From 2015

I heard once that in ancient Jewish culture,
It was a compliment to tell someone
They had a limp.
A sign of time in the desert.
A symbol of your having wrestled with God
and come out with a new name.
A badge of honor for having had the courage to fight in the first place.

I went nearly a month without eating much after you left.
Stole the nourish from myself to try and prove
there was at least one thing I could control.
Ate your goodbye instead.
Sat by while my stomach inched
the acid of that sickness back up.
And it took me forever to cough you back out.

My eldest friend called loss of love at that magnitude “being dismembered.”

Most days, I can’t stop thinking about how
you will never know what it looked like when I lost my arms.
Held a gun for the first time and fired
the only weapon I thought I had left
until the bullseye looked like my reflection.

How you will never know what it looked like
when my knees broke out from under me.
That first time I saw a photo of the two of you together,
drank in his smiling face next to yours
and watched him quote your poetry in adoration,
my roommate caught my collapsing torso.
I army crawled to the alley behind our home and
threw torn pages from a book you left behind
until there were enough of them to build myself a paper wheelchair.
Treated its tires like turbines and
wailed into the darkness long enough to
power myself back inside.

How you will never know all the mornings I woke up weeping.
A few semi-conscious seconds before reality cracked back through my brain.
A pillow the only levy between my sobs and
the ears of anyone outside my door.

Or the night I spent reading on the couch until
the sound of your newly-ticking baby clock beat so loudly
through my body, my heart forgot it needed to.

Or how many weeks I woke up at 5am to nightmares of you.
Watched you get ready for bed and never come,
no matter how long I waited.

Or the time one of my colleagues asked
if everything was okay with me,
saying he was relieved that I’d only lost my girlfriend,
because he was afraid someone had actually died.

One year later, I walked through the Portland airport a second time.
Remembered my dislocated hip,
felt the phantom pain of 365 days of learning to walk again.
Took my heart out for a run.
Tried to be gentle to my lungs as they fought to
remember the taste of air.

Now, standing at this distance,
I consider deserts holy places.
Will take solitude over dishonesty.
See gratitude as the posture of those who have survived deep pain.
Accept that wrestling with God does, in fact,
have a way of grinding beauty into your bones.
Know that growth most often happens when you’re pinned,
face in the hot dirt, and not when walking in the cool of the garden.

Cannot remember what it was like to be called Jacob.
Respond now only to those who call me Israel.
And hope the whole world can see how gorgeous my limp is,
every time I brave taking another step.