The bedroom window is open.
I leave the window open now.
The open window lets in streams of fresh air and the whisking narration of city cars and city stories mingling with the calming conversations of surrounding trees and my room shifts into a peaceful sanctuary.
I nestle in at the desk near the window, a half-opened window with parted blinds, and relish the brush of air on my skin, the lush greenery of the trees pressing themselves closer to me.
I sip my coffee. I freely write in a journal thickening with impressions, expressions, past iterations.
I start simple. I always start simple with journal entries: the five senses revived until the sixth sense stretches wide awake in an uninhibited rush of introspective explorations and insights.
I write about the loveliness of this morning scene, of this self-curated routine, and then gratitude spills into innocently asked questions.
Why haven’t I been leaving my window open? Why is this such a novel idea?
Why have I lived here for almost two years and kept the blinds closed?
And then I remember.
I realize I have lived here, in this bungalow, for two years.
I remember today’s date.
This is an anniversary, or an eve of an anniversary, or…I can’t recall and will not make the attempt to extract the exact date from the haze signaling the incident that marks the before and after in my life.
There is a before. There is the incident. There is the after.
I live in a body that can rekindle the feeling of the before, blurs the feeling of the incident, and breathes more slowly in the after.
“Anniversary.” I want to salvage that word from the taint of trauma. I resist committing this date to memory, but my higher heart and my infinitely wise body push the truth, like a splinter that needs to be freed, up and up and up to the surface of my skin which is my morning writing.
Why has it taken two years for me to open the window half-way?
Love, healing is non-linear, and simply lifting the blinds, the allowing of the light, is a daily act of courage in its own right.
I return to my women.
In the living room, news reports on the UN resolution to end rape as a weapon of war. The details unfold of the measures the U.S. administration took to gut the resolution of any mention of healthcare for women and girls who are the survivors of sexual warfare.
I seethe in rage. There’s falling despair in that familiar swarm of anger, and there is a vision formed from that fire. Recycle the energy of rage into feeling the unfathomable pain and channel the fury into service.
Time to return to my women.
I believe in my women. I champion for my women. I fiercely adore the radiant resiliency of my women. Time to return to serving their shine.
And I am uncertain of how this time, because in the past, I took a linear route and question if my skillset and my personality in that field optimally serves. I’m questioning, and the answers arise when I pay attention. So I start paying attention. And in paying attention, I realize I feel at home, nourished, seen empowered when I am with my women.
So I return to my women.
I walk with a mother whose hair flows in streaks of tangerine and pinks, like the sunset where she teaches me about the Texas wildflowers.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s voice drips in honeyed kindness as she advocates to follow our curiosities, and flickering inspirations brighten the commute.
I drink gin and tonic with women who spark laughter on and off the improv stage, and they listen intently when I spill my insecurities about how I feel misplaced at times in the comedy world. I feel stronger in my softness after sharing in a happy hour with them, because they accept me and cheer me on in the medicine that is women gathering.
And in the exquisite and haunting film, “A Little Chaos” (where Alan Rickman is the French king and Kate Winslet the creatrice of the gardens of Versailles), the women of court gather, too. In the decadent beauty of a private sitting room they speak openly on death, a subject the king forbids in public. But in the intimate circle of women, they say the names of the children lost, the men mourned, the ways they shift and carry the anguish of living and loving in a fragile world.
There’s profound healing power in women. I return to this truth.
When the knife tumbles and slices my foot open, I call out to the same woman I called two years ago today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. Again anniversary. Exact date hazy.
And my mind glazes over the exact moments leading to this bizarre kitchen accident, too.
I lean into the knives while looking upward for the cans of soup.
How did I lean into the knives?
Two years ago I send her text explaining my situation and within minutes she replies.
Bright red blood gushes from a cut shaped like sunglasses and I call her name just once and she instantly appears.
My blood puddles onto the kitchen floor. She leads me to the chair, she cleans up my blood with no hesitation, no disgust, and hands me a checkered towel.
I reach to the anchor that is my breath as I press into the wound.
The kitchen table becomes CVS. She stays right by my side, coaches me through the next step and sits with me by the tub as the water turns red and we wrap up my foot.
She’s an immediate nurse, a woman who calmly steps into crisis and remains centered in compassion and hearted-reason during the storm. The storm of an injured foot. The storm of the incident that sent me to her. She’s my lifeline, a saint who took me in when I was petrified in a city that only had been home for three weeks.
“Come anyway,” she texts me while I stand in that former closet with locked windows and drawn blinds.
She gathers me in, welcomes me to her home, and tells me again and again, “This is your home now.”
And it takes two years for me to open the windows, and that’s all right, because when I do open the windows, I am met by gentle air that returns me back to my own resiliency, and back to my own trust in the healing that comes in the smallest acts that let in the light.