“This is it. I overheat my leftover morning coffee, and it is such a relief to be alive now. Here, in my kitchen, with fresh flowers and the sink clean, here in my home, in the first days of spring drinking coffee with nutmeg and cinnamon, overheated. You always thought I was too sweet, too sugary. Now, I am home alone. I open all the windows. I let the spring in. Now, I call myself an artist. I am not ashamed of it. All the mess has been with me for such a long time, It’s a permanent fixture. I sweep the floor. Winter is over. I call her my lover. I call up my mother and I do not apologize. For twenty years, I have lied. Now I hang my sheets out on the clothesline. Now I am bloodstains, white lines, and linen, and the right way to say that I’ve changed my mind. I am do not plan to hide anymore. Here, in my home, the screens have fallen from the windows. All my mess is exposed: The thawing, the dried dead roses she gave me, the suicide notes I wrote when I was younger, my thumb smudging blush across cheeks. Sometimes the life leaks right out of me. Sometimes love is more bloody than sweet. Now I am older. I am more than my body. I am more than the heat of last summer, than the numbers I dialed in desperation. Now I am thin again, mending my old jeans, mending bridges, remembering all of the men who have put their hands on me. Now, I remember numbness. I remember forgiveness never coming. I remember bending over toilets in high school bathrooms, fingers down my throat, pages and pages of suicide notes. It is such a relief to be alive now. I do not know how I survived my own youth, so ill-prepared to fit my sick mind in so simple a body. So ill-prepared to want to be me. God the father, god the holy: You owe me nothing. It has never been as easy as it is now. Now I know how to inhabit my body. Now I know there are people who love me. It is spring, I am ripe, I’m becoming. Forgive me.”
— March First; Hannah Beth Ragland
