Where the milk thistle grows

To say that she has gotten used to living with lonliness is not exactly right. There is a place of nowhere that she goes to when it gets too dark, too terrifying, too bleak. She disappears, that is the right term. She disappears instead of being lonely.

There are certain experiences that change the make up of a person. A lot of wise men throughout history have claimed that people don't ever really change. But sometimes, that is not true. Certain things can happen that will shift the composition of a human soul. A generally out going, glass-half-full kind of person can shift into the kind of person who wishes for invisibility.

That is what happened to her. A long chain of losses, and then she fell through fifty thousand feet of clouds, into a new version of herself. Someone she is still trying to understand, fighting to overcome.

They diagnosed her with post traumatic stress disorder. But, really, it is just a medical term for what your grandmother would call a broken heart. Or, a broken spirit. Her mother told her to try to find God again. Her therapists told her to meditate, focus on the good things, that all of the sorrow is a learned habit that can be unlearned. The internet told her to manifest her dreams, in a technique called "The Way".

She thinks they are all full of shit. They don't know what it is like to watch your lifelong held view of the world suddenly shift, and be pulled out into the universe like saltwater taffy. All new colors, unrecognizable shapes, unintelligable languages - they don't know what it is like to become an alien in the world that made you.

Every day, she greets the morning, as it carries with it a basket of sorrow and says to her, "Here you go. Here is the sunshine pouring through your windows. Here is the hunger in your gut. Here is your bottomless sense of loss. Do what you can with it."

She wishes for a quiet field of wildflowers, high in the mountains, the one she knows is there, where she was born. She thinks of high noon, and a warm, dry wind. Away from the lowcountry, the salt air. Away from people everywhere, watching. She wants to go anywhere but nowhere. Anywhere but here, today, right now.