I watch her pupils dilate as she sees herself clearly for perhaps the first time.
She likes what she sees.
It’s in part surprise, in part not. How could it surprise me when this human vessel is so exquisite? Beautiful and resilient. Here, at this moment, I find the kind of love I don’t often find where I tend to look, except for the night skies full of glittering stars, great vast oceans, untouched mountains, giant ancient trees, and the peace of my dog happily rolling around in the grass of his backyard—the places I find heaven.
A melding of light and warmth, sitting along her bare arm beneath streams of sunlight. She loves warmth but hasn’t had the opportunity to experience it too often. She doesn’t know how to pace herself, she overindulges. Her arm is becoming red-hot. To anyone else, it is quite apparent that she needs to remove her arm from where it rests, even if the feeling is that damned good. A moment of meditation as music floods her senses, and she pours her soul out onto a $10 writer’s workbook she impulsively purchased at the bookstore yesterday.
God, she was craving this. Being outdoors, free to sit, feel, and connect. To make sense of some of the jumbled chaos roaring around in her scared and tired little head.
Finally, peace.
Even as the neighbor’s terrible music blares past her earphones when her music lulls, and most of the time, she wishes she had a quiet place up in the mountains, safely tucked away from the world at large. She understands now that it’s not how things work, and she has to practice creating her little bubble in the middle of the chaos. The neighbor’s terrible music and incessantly yapping little dogs be damned.
It doesn’t matter what’s out there when her bubble is solid. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know where she will live in a few months, when this heartbreak will abate, when her next partner will show up, what she will be driving in a few months, and if her physical and emotional bodies will heal. None of it matters if there is peace in here.
For today, at least, she conquered the world.
She achieved peace in a time of war.