El sol y sus flores

On the last day of love, my heart cracked inside my body. When you left, you took the sun with you, and I drew every curtain in the house to tell the light to go. I spent my nights casting spells to bring you back, eating the wilting flowers you gave me one by one, desperate for any part of you. Your absence was a missing limb, a jealousy that made me want to rip the sky apart for raining on you when my hands could not. I tried to leave many times, but my lungs would buckle, panting for your air. I knew I was beating a dead thing, but did it matter? Something, even the abuse, was better than the empty space you left behind.

The initial shock gave way to a slow, creeping ache. Every morning began with the same violent realization that you were gone. It wasn't what we left behind that broke me; it was the construction site of our future, the pylons and planks of wood waiting for our return. I was loyal long after you were gone, unable to meet another's eyes, saving my hands for when you came back. But day by day, I realized the person I missed was a mirage, someone who was never there at all. Why is it that when the story ends, we begin to feel all of it?

The fall became a freefall into a deeper darkness. Depression was a shadow living inside me, a numbness that hardened me until I dreamed only of softening. My body became a source of shame. *Why are you so unkind to me*, it cried. *Cause you don't look like them*, I told her. This body also became a home that was broken into, a place I could no longer recognize as my own. Someone kicked the front door in, took everything, and left a hole the size of his manhood in my chest. For years I carried his guilt, decorating my home with his shame, until I finally set it down. It takes a broken person to come searching for meaning between my legs; it takes a whole person to survive it.

To heal, I had to go backward, to the roots. I found my mother, who sacrificed her dreams so I could dream. I found my father, who pulled his family from poverty without knowing what a vowel was. Their lives were a poetry I could never write, their broken english a masterpiece of survival, their accents thick like honey. I am the offspring of two countries colliding, the product of ancestors who decided their stories needed to be told. They are the fabric of my being, the people who sewed me whole. I stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me, and my whole life has been an uprising, one burial after another.

Rise, said the moon, and the new day came. Life does not stop for anybody; it drags you by the legs whether you want to move forward or not. I went for my *i can'ts* and *i won'ts*, lined them up and shot them dead. I wove a cloth from my hair and scrubbed the self-hate off the bone until it exposed love. I realized that what is stronger than the human heart, which shatters over and over and still lives? I finally understood that if I am the longest relationship of my life, it is time to nurture intimacy with the person I lie in bed with each night.

And then, you appeared. I was apprehensive, because falling into you meant falling out of him, and I had not prepared for that. How do I welcome kindness when I have only practiced spreading my legs for the terrifying? You are not them. You are medicinal. You do not stand in my way; you make space for me to step forward. *What is it with you and sunflowers*, you ask. I point to the field of yellow outside. Sunflowers worship the sun, I say. When it arrives, they rise. When it leaves, they bow their heads. That is what the sun does to those flowers. It's what you do to me.

This is the recipe of life. People, like flowers, must wilt, fall, root, and rise in order to bloom. I learned that everything is temporary: moments, feelings, people. I learned that vulnerability is always the right choice in a world that makes it so difficult to remain soft. It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself that I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole. The year is done. I have cremated the unnecessary. Here I go, stronger and wiser into the new. The sun and her flowers are here.