Becca Re

The first day of my life was the last day of my life. Four years ago when I rode in the backseat of that squad car to the ER to get 6 pints of new blood, I let the bad blood go. I'd spent the years prior seeping in a slow suicide, wondering when the next breath would be my last. I didn't want to die, but I knew I probably wouldn't have noticed if I did. I was trapped and I was frightened, and any movement toward change seemed like too much effort, so I waited. I waited for time to take its course. I waited to stop feeling sick. I waited for the sky in all its bursting energy to give me answers to the questions I had, to shed light in the darkness, to point a path where no road was clear. That was four years ago. And now it's been so long that I can't remember five years ago firsthand.

Things are different now. I have since dropped my bad habits. I have since accepted my diagnoses and the pills that come with them. I have mourned the deaths of everything I've lost and everyone who's lost me. I remembered the first time I wrote a poem when my mother and step-father were arguing about divorce as I was filling in the last definition for the final word of my vocabulary worksheet on the wide-ruled yellow paper from Mrs. Greenberg's 3rd grade classroom, how I crawled out onto the slanted roof below my bedroom window to marvel at the big oak tree in the front yard that my father had planted upon arrival, how I measured the distance from gutter to branches, how I dreamed of escape, the way words were my only salvation. I remembered the bedrooms of each man I shared space with since then, the definitions of each pair of arms that would hold me like a word, the way I made them my only salvation. And in remembering where I came from, I remembered where I went, and where I was, how far I've come since that rooftop that I still drive by on the occasion that I feel like having a minor panic attack. And I write.

I write to mourn and to meditate. I write to breathe and to break free. I write to live. And perhaps most importantly, I write to die. To let the past go, to leave yesterday where it is, to start today where it should be. This is the moUrning after my death, and this is how I live it.