It was midnight when her shadow spilled across my bedroom floor.
I had only just performed the ritual hours ago in the waning light of what I had thought to be my last night on earth.
Now, there she stood – a blue-skinned beauty, her many arms flailing gracefully under a cloak of moonlight. A paradox within herself. Her tongue undulated in sharp, stuttering motions, its metallic plates sliding over one another like shifting armor, rippling like a snake’s scales. With her presence came the sound of something more ancient than trumpeting angels. The animal in me sighed with relief. She wasn’t the God of America, or Men, or the Majority. She wasn’t pristine or perfection. She was emboldened Truth. An otherworldly sensation of living on the other side of things through the perspective of being whole.
Nothing in existence could have pulled my gaze from hers: neither the screams of my mother nor the pleas of my children would hold my attention in her presence.
All of this was happening framed by the window of my ramshackle apartment. The garbage can overflowed. The dishes piled high. I had fallen asleep on the couch and left a few lines of coke on the coffee table. All of it, there for her Blessed Eyes to see. Shame cored its hole in me. If she would shatter me for this shameful indecorum, I would welcome it —anything to release the pressure bubbling inside.
Was there even anything to say?
No words formed on my lips, or in my mind. The Goddess slid her tongue back into her mouth before stretching it into a smile. My own lips curled. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and mine did the same. Her voice was a snake curling through the cracks in my brain.
Are you ready?
This was it. This is what I had asked for, begged for.
Yes. I knew the answer even as the doubt danced at my empty depths.
Her jaw dropped again, slowly, creaking like a rusted hinge, until her mouth was wide with hunger. She lunged and her teeth sank into my neck, her lips curled against my skin and she drank all the words I never said, she swallowed all my regrets. Her tongue lapped at all the love I held back. At all the steps I never took. At all the things I didn’t need, the weight I told myself I had to carry. She ate all of it with unfettered joy.
Just as quickly, she was gone and the air sang with the absence of her body.
I sat up, gasping as if she’d taken all the air in my lungs with her. But no, it was something else. There was space at the pit of my stomach, openness at the seat of my soul. No hole or emptiness. Freedom. My Freedom.
That familiar part of me, it searched for fear. It peered under all the usual places looking for doubt and shame. They were there but now only a shadow of their former selves. A memory. Scar Tissue. A foundation to stand on.
From then on, every thought, even the scary ones, well, they were all laced silver with hope.