The Decision (Soka Chan)

She, with a solemness about Her, draped Herself across Her bed, drew Her knees toward her chest, and allowed Her posture to echo that of what could have been one year prior. without invitation, Longing and Emptiness joined Her beneath the sheets.

for This, this act that people named "good" or "a gift to spare her from foul timing," was Her reality. It was the act of Being Without, not spared. while She accepted that it was the mind of the Universe herself who had made the final decision, it did not change that a year later the hollowness remained.

rather than attempting to forget, She removed the alarms and ceased swallowing the ever-efficient daily reminders of what had failed to actualize. She began to rehabilitate her Body, making herself aware of what entered its temple walls. as the anniversary approached she put down what destroyed her internal alter and surrounded herself with others who could hold worlds within them.

and on this day, the day that it washed over her that her season of remembrance was ahead, She Decided. In a world where She was already Othered, in a world where She was already foreign, alien, strange and perhaps Unreal, She would be most valuable to the Universe and Her inhabitants if She did what moves Her. what stares it could bring. what flames judgmental eyes could send to tongue at Her face; they had licked before and She had not burned.

while the rest wail their songs of grief into their knees She vowed to silently take Her sorrow and fold it into a link in her chain, another reason to Live Her Life Her way. labeless and unowned, this night she promised to herself to step briskly, quietly, and shoeless, into the world of which she was already familiar. to love vigorously whomever and whatever longed to be loved, to turn her back on no possibility, to create when war threatened to tear worlds apart. there is no Right Time in the future. the Right Time is Now.

so here, in this hour she lay with a compressed bust and the hollowness inside of her, kept chilly in winter by Longing and Emptiness against her will. she will see the light, of this she is aware. but first she must sit and allow herself to drink all of the Loss that will serve to remind her, for the rest of her life, of what she is capable. of what she must do. she will remember what could have been but she will not fantasize. for in her world of stolen promises reality need not be romanticized.