Grounding
We sat on giant boulders by a creek in Washington, reminding me of the creek back home in Illinois we would go to together or alone, dirty reeds and flat rocks covered by a canopy of trees. Filled with cigarette butts and liquor bottles, the remnants of old friends and bad habits, a place that became a ritual of summer comfort. You told me about the grounding technique your therapist taught youā planting your bare feet on the earth or imagining your trauma written on paper and burned, travelling a river.
You had forgotten we had done this at our creek at seventeen until I told you about us and two other girls, our legs dangling at the edge and our palms grasping Bic lighters as we wrote worries on paper scraps and lit them on fire. The smell of smoke and rain permeated a blue dusk. I wrote down calculus and my abuserās name. We watched their paths until they disappeared into the trees or beneath the water, like paper cranes, a peaceful diligence that morphed into mourning for them like the bodies of a Norse funeral pyre.
I sometimes bury my hands in cool, coarse soil.
It reminds me of where I come from and where Iāll go.
Everything in-between is the cold, liquid yellow, that rises and falls everyday, instructs and embodies life.
