Perhaps I didn’t realize how much I was healing back then…dancing in my quiet apartment, shuffling my feet across the scrubbed hardwood floor. One wall of the dining room was a floor to ceiling mirror and I would dance and sing for hours, watching my body sway, gently touching myself, stroking my legs and arms, hugging my arms around my body as I moved towards loving myself.
There were fresh flowers on the table and a fridge full of cake…tiger cake with fudge and ganache and cream…I would eat the cake on the couch, maybe half of a cake in one sitting, leaving it on the coffee table JUST IN CASE I wasn’t done. I don’t think I ate a vegetable for four months. And I danced and sang. My invisible mic doubled as a fork…
And then I would stay up late writing. The music would still be on, playing gently on my laptop while tears fell not so gently down my face. I would openly sob, purposefully playing songs that brought the worst memories to the surface, because what is music but a lyrical Charon of pain? At two or three in the morning, I would collapse into my soft bed, and with the music gone, the nightmares would arrive.
Slowly they came less and less, scared away with the writing and the dancing and the singing and the flowers and the cake…and the love.
