Right now, I am thinking of burning it all down. I am thinking of torching it and watching its splendid ashes float to the ground. Every time I step outside of my chalk-lined box or circle forever made around me. That is what I am doing.
I am lighting the match. I am knocking down trees with my bare fists, not caring how bloodied my knuckles become. Because I get to be the bulldozer and not the bulldozed. You may think it takes an act of gigantic proportion but to me, it is whipping around Manhattan on tired feet last week or opening my mouth and letting the words fall out, letting them hang and sit for my sister to hear, the words I have longed to tell her for almost 2 years—I miss you.
The act of taking this class and not apologizing for sitting here on a Wednesday morning. Every new thing, everything I hadn’t seen myself doing burns it down, slays a monster, feels like I could give a butterfly the strength of a lion.
It closes the curtain of who I thought I was, what I “should” be doing, fear of what someone would say or how lost I would become.
That curtain doesn’t get to come back up.
Kristina Hamlett writes to connect, heal, and be a force for change. 