2KVYOT3.L0VE
Tukayote Helianthus v2
Walking away from suffering.Walking towards love.With intention.
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Today I told someone I bought flowers for that the sunflower always faces the sun, a metaphor almost identical to that of the bison. Earlier this year, I deleted a song because it hurt too much to hear, then danced to it again and found out grief was never something you delete, only something you finally let speak. This is a story about giving up control, walking back into what I’d been avoiding, and a piece of Lakota wisdom that was given to me, not taken, by a woman who reminded me the bison does not run from the storm.
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Pain means I still have a heart. It’s better to feel it than to be indifferent. A song, a video, and the truth that love doesn’t disappear when it changes, it just asks to be carried differently.
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Liminality on the first day of August. The farmers market, an old friend, a hug that felt like glitter, a painting that looks like my insides, a poster of suffering hitting the curb, Bigfoot, a fellow multiple exposure freak, climbing shoes and chalk, mountain bikes, ice cream, and a dance nobody saw except the 360 camera. I hit an unexpected new low, in the best way possible.
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I almost walked past a footpath that changed my whole month. Same beach, same stairs, same everything, until one small path I’d never noticed dropped me into a ravine I didn’t know existed. Turns out the dead end had the gold at the bottom of it the whole time, and so did the rest of July.
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Farmers market cherries, a hug and sweet smiles from a sparkling ray of sunshine, a skirt that won in La Conner, and a twenty foot drop I didn’t fall into at Clayton Beach. A silly, fearless, unmasked 201st day of sobriety, and I am the captain of it.
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Two hundred days completely sober from every chemical, gotten in the hardest chapter of my life. Grief lodge, amends without asking forgiveness, being labeled by people I once trusted and loved, months of nervous system hell, a five year no contact order finally expiring, the manifesto that guided me, a peer support circle that never let me go it alone, and the word I didn’t have until June, autistic.
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I’ve been performing again, not for other people this time, but for myself. Selfies, smiles, hand hearts, all real, all covering a grief I haven’t let myself feel. The mask is off.
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