enchantment

You cannot steal enchantment, you must be invited. I don't imagine it was my grandmother who told me this, but these past few nights when I lay my head down on my pillow, I once again hear stories in my mind. My voice is slowly returning--still broken in many ways--but even in this faint whisper I feel promise after so many quiet months where my only company has been Aaron's restless body beside me; the continued assault of details and concerns about our life in the midst of this transplant; and the image of Onni falling dead at my feet on a beach side playground.

I have been unable to sit and make sense of things the way I once did and have chosen instead to dissociate from my thoughts and words. My mind is a castle in ruins, its shape not entirely unfamiliar, but still merely a reminder of what it once was. I see fragments of who I am in the relics---memories, hopes, dreams, qualities, companions, experiences I used to have and the ones I still desire--but there is so much more that is no longer visible amongst the chambers in all states of collapse. Each day I study the outline for evidence of what was built and destroyed. Last night I began again with what was lost and then allowed myself to consider what may have been found in return.

It was then that I heard the stones breathe my stories into the air, and with them, the pulse of suggestion.

I want to believe in castles and mysteries and beauty. I want to believe in the power of intention to recreate and transform and restore. I want to believe in a deep enchantment that will smooth and soothe and capture me fully. My voice is coaxed out, stones slide into place and evoke spiral stairs, stone vaults, a gable pitched roof, the battlements I may need to see my way through this siege, and I begin again