The House...

...It is a two-story white house with a wrap-around porch. It has black shutters and reminds me of an old farm house. It has what seemed to be two dozen windows just inviting the sun's rays to come in to rejuvenate me. In the winter we meet inside. We always meet in her living room when it is too cold to sit on the porch. There are two big, brown leather chairs in front of the fire place. The walls were a soft green that looked as though the grass and the river had come together and splashed onto the walls. For some reason, even though it was inside, I still felt as open and free as I would if we were sitting outside. Perhaps that is why I never minded when it got cold. In the warmer months, we set up shop on the porch. The back porch is adorned with 3 different wind chimes, all playing their different songs as I sang mine each week. There are 4 white rocking chairs that showed the wear and tear of the generations of women that had sat in them before me. I always inspected the arms of the chairs wondering if the hands before me had clenched as hard as I found myself doing each week.

The house is on a bluff overlooking the river. With thousands of yards of grass leading my eyes to the river, I always felt safe in my rocking chair but with the slight eagerness to one day, have the spirit and wholeness to run as fast as I could through that grass down to the river. But for the time being, I sat on the porch with my counselor who forced me to take my time and not rush to the other side of my identity. The version of myself that I desired was waiting for me in the river but I needed to properly say goodbye to the broken version of myself first. Each week she guided me through those goodbyes. I felt I was picking petals off a flower, "I love you, I love you not. I love you, I love you not." There were parts of myself I was not sad to see go. The harder weeks were when I had to let go of the "petals" that I thought were keeping me safe. Those petals always seemed to fall a bit slower to the ground.

She knew I needed to sit on that porch and work through the mess and blurred maze I had created for myself before running down to the river. My heart had never thirsted for water so deeply...