I remember being glad when Christmas was over.
When my birthday passed.
When any holiday was over with
And months loomed between me and the next one.
Because I would wait, you see.
I would send a message
And then wait
For hours and hours
Every time
For the person I loved
To say something back.
And so often
Too often
The hours would stretch
In silence.

I remember so well that feeling
The nausea that began as a small cherry pit in my stomach
And grew
Sprouting toxic roots and expanding as the minutes ticked by.
"She'll say something. It's Christmas. She'll say something."
Hours.
It bloomed, ****** and jagged, filling me up in the emptiest way
And I waited, pretending I was the same,
Pretending I didn't hold such a seed of misery
And feed it my love
With every breath.

I never cried on those days.
Even when "she" really didn't say anything
And ignored me on Christmas
Because of a fight we'd had
Over how much I loved her.
(Too much.)
These were the days that taught me love could be a disease
And that maybe mine was.
It is a lesson I am trying to unlearn.
It is a battle I will be fighting for a long time-
For that tree
Even when the day was done
And I had accepted defeat

Bore fruit.

From the thick, tough branches it swelled
And ran it's black juice down the trunk like fingers to the base of me, to my ground inside,
An invasion, a sickness,
And soaked it through.
It grew ripe and heavy
And fell like gore
And as it burst open its seeds burrowed deep into the heart of me
To wait.

Sometimes I feel the rumblings of life within my stomach
Like a changeling child
Not of me, but of this toxic world,
Growing
Determined to claw its way out.
I try never to feed it.
I try never to nourish the parts of me that created such deathly life
And sprouted such creeping, choking vines and roots.
I have been digging to unearth them, to rip them out of me and burn them, one by one.
I have learned, at least, that if I am a garden inside
I must watch carefully for intruders
For poisonous, dark things
Which can take hold and strangle the delicate flowers whose healing petals sooth the walls of me and cling to my bones with a touch like starlight.
They must be protected- so easily dislodged and wilted.
Fear is hard to ****, rejection, even harder.
I have learned that there are two kinds of hope-
The free, open kind, born of light and air, and soft as dandelion down
And the toxic kind, heavy and slow,
Heavy and rough and thorned.
One kind can sustain you,
The other
Reanimate the dead parts of you and make them walk again, all fingernails and exposed bone.
I have gained, through those days,
Through those haunted occasions
Such a sense of inner landscape,
Such a knowledge of the types of feelings that live in me.
Such an understanding that not everything that grows should be nurtured.

Now
I no longer fear days of celebration.
I cherish them
But always I know of that seed within me
Of the darkness that clings to the underside of everything, yet to be completely banished.
My faith that it will fade with time does not diminish the caution with which I move inside myself,
The careful, deliberate way I think of love.
Only time will rid me of this
Time and patience
A conscious decision never to feed my darkness,
And the love of someone kind and constant.
I can feel light seeping into me slowly,
And I know it will win.
And yet I remember when there was none,
And the remembering- that will save me, in the end.
That will keep me vigilant
And patient
And gentle, inside.
And someday
I will hold nothing but sunlight, joy, and kindness.
For now, though, I peer under every leaf, a careful gardener, a taster of poison berries,
A diligent caretaker of a wild heart.