refuge (for my mother)What your mother does is go to the desert. That’s what she’s alway

refuge (for my mother)What your mother does is go to the desert. That’s what she’s always done, and that’s what she does now. You’ll try to explain it in the city to a man ten years your senior. How the stark canyon walls swirled red and gold and the sandstone scraped your fingers raw til your skin felt new. How water in the desert felt like a holy revelation. How the cacti reminded you of the way a boyfriend once told you, You know, not everything has to hurt, and you didn’t agree with him. How nothing is actually baren, everything is alive, and the sun can bleach your bones from the inside out, and your soul slips away and a piece of you is left there until the next time you come back, and it finds you like a shadow.But there aren’t words for the desert in the city, and your sober tongue will feel drunk when you stumble over yourself. The sky is too low here, the earth too flat and paved and smooth. Maybe you just let it ebb away. Or maybe you try to lay it bare, pick it clean like a carrion crow on bones. When you were barely eighteen and becoming a coyote she didn’t recognize, she took you to the desert. You had a scavenger’s heart, you had a bruise blooming in a place no one could see, you had a thin red smile for a throat. She knew, somehow, that there was only one way to set you right, so your mother packed the car and drove south. The two of you spent a few days hiding like outlaws, following winding trails and watching storms roll in over the plateaus. The red dirt turned to dark mud which stained your feet. The sky slanted sideways. All around you, the world was alive, shot with light from between the clouds. But all you could feel was the rain on your skin. The rain, the rain, the rain. It was cold and encompassing and for the first time in months, you could feel your own heart beat.The night you let a strange man carve a carnivore into the back your neck, someone sang you the song you didn’t know was written into your bones: If she wasn’t raised by wolves / she’d be a goner for sure. The wolf who loved you, she was always saving you in the desert. So it’s no surprise that she, your mother, goes to save herself. It was always her domain. She was the woman who taught you to scramble, she was the one who told you it is always easier to climb up than it is to come down. When you’re ascending, you never think about coming back. Your mother gave you cliffs, and taught you not to throw yourself off them. She was the woman who would hold you to her chest when you smelled most like sandstone and sage. Who taught you how to dig yourself out of an eddy in the riverwater, who read novels aloud under the stars, who was and is and always will be your only trusted compass.You get to thinking about the saguaro cactus, Carnegiea gigantea. They do not grow in your desert; you have Opuntia chloritica, Grusonia puchella. They grow in Arizona, in Sonora, a Mexican state named for Our Lady of the Rosary where grey wolves still lope and howl. But still, you think of your mother, your family, the limb you hacked off when you found your father out. A saguaro without an arm is called a spear. It becomes something wounded, but still sharp. When a saguaro is scarred, it heals over with callous flesh. It can survive, can bloom.When you slipped on ice and showed up in a literature class with your knees torn to shreds and the boy who looked too much like him sitting next to you, sitting too close to you, said, Oh my god, you’re bleeding, you wanted immediately to be sick. That girl, barely eighteen, came flooding back to you with sand in her mouth and blood smeared on her thighs. You wanted immediately to dry and crack like the desert floor. But you were raised by a wolf of a woman who put the cold of the Colorado River in your veins so you turned and looked him in the eye and said, I know.Maybe you can’t explain any of this. Maybe you fall asleep strangely and wake up with a crick in your neck that lingers the whole time your mother stays in the desert. An ache, an absence. The part of you which was buried forever in the desert, your refuge.(image via @fromthebeehivetothebay) -- source link

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