You Are Becoming Something New

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Shelter (2023) by Danielle Mckinney

I am writing to you from a new city, from a new bed in an old apartment with walls strewn with cracks – healed and still-open scars from all its past lives. I saw its lesions and signed the lease anyway because somewhere inside me, something just as lacerated wanted – needed – to be externalized.

I am writing to you as a different woman, whose latest violent metamorphosis began in the unexpected and explosive split-second of unlocking my husband’s phone for the first time in our near-decade-long relationship and learning how much of our relationship was a well-spun lie.

I am writing to you after a year I only remember because I scrawled it into dense walls of text as my world fell around me in shards:

How betrayal feels like physiological malaise, like your brain and chest are perpetually crushed in a fiery vice; how a spirit can tear like paper; how sadness tastes like bile and salt.

I scribbled the names of the women with whom I unknowingly shared my marriage; the dates of their meetings with my husband; how much some of them cost for a half hour, an hour, or two of their time in Marriott Hotels (where he could earn points on his credit card), and in surreptitious “service” apartments around town. And this was only the tip of the iceberg.

I am writing to you as a woman who looked in the mirror day after day – before breakfast, between work meetings, at bedtime – and saw what it looks like when joy atrophies inside a person, when hope is sucked out from behind the eyes.

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Art by Abdellah Laassili. IG: harerta_

Simultaneously, I am writing to you as a woman who is becoming the kind of woman my mother read about in novels and admired aloud on our evening walks: Brave though afraid, soft, and dangerous because she is choosing to possess and save herself; because somewhere in the melee of life as a woman, she is beginning the hefty work of identifying and defining her own worth.

It’s true that I fled my marital home with two suitcases, two backpacks, and one yoga mat on an afternoon when he wasn’t home. It’s true that I restarted my life in a new city, in a new state, with just these possessions in tow.

It is also true that through the clamor of my life collapsing, two refrains rang in my mind as I labored and birthed myself into this new and uncertain chapter:

1. “I Come As One, But I Stand As 10,000.”

I wore my mother’s engagement ring that day – a part of her I inherited after she died almost 10 years ago. I wear it when I need to feel her closely, or when I’m doing something she would have wanted or needed to attend. I wore it that day because I was as fragile as a butterfly wing. Heart-wrecked, confused, slightly manic, heavy, and my face damp with tears. My cousins and best friends (the only five people who knew what had happened) held me up. One took the day off to help me pack, and, along with her boyfriend, drove me to the new city. Another prepared a room in her house for me to stay while I found my feet. The others called, prayed, advised, and loved me from the countries, states, and towns where they lived.

Though starting over is a uniquely lonesome experience, I was not alone that day, nor have I truly been alone since. I did not arrive at this point, coming to my own rescue, entirely by my own strength. My mother, grandmother, and long lineage of women before me (blood-related and not) created steps for me to climb up and launch myself from. In small and large ways, in private and in public, they chipped away at their constraints, creating new freedoms that were inherited by the next generations – inherited by me. They advocated for themselves as much as they could with as much as they had. For their education, their respect, and their rights to their own bodies and life paths.

I carried this intergenerational female defiance with me as I slammed the front door, piled my things into the car, and drove into the future. Together, with all these women in my heart, with my cousin in the front seat, we sped down the grey highway into a new beginning.

2. “Ebe ọ bụla ihe guzoro, ihe ọzọ ga-eguzo n’akụkụ ya.”

(Translation: Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.)

Igbo people are dualists. Traditionally, we resist absolutism. The universe is balanced by everything having its double, its complementary opposite. In traditional Igbo ideology, people are not even born alone. You are sent into the world with your Chi – your spirit double, who is both you and separate from you; who moves parallel to you and, in collaboration with you, negotiates pathways in the realm we can’t see.

Because of this, we do not believe in dead ends. There is always more than one way to perceive and give meaning to anything. Many roads can lead away from somewhere, and just as many can lead towards somewhere. And we, by virtue of our existence, possess the power to discover, choose, and will those varied possibilities into reality.

The very existence of anguish, destruction, despair, and betrayal means that, somewhere near, there is also an abundance of healing, reclaiming, hope, joy, and love. But it hardly ever just drops into your hands. You must be courageous enough, insistent, and defiant enough to go and look for it and look for yourself in it. You have to believe it exists for you to find it. Then, when you find it, it is up to you and your Chi to fiercely protect it, to fight and claw to keep it, keep it soft, and keep it alive. It is up to you to write a new story for yourself and the ones who are coming after you.

The Hours Behind You (2011) by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

So. I am writing to you from a new city, from a warm and perfectly flawed apartment, whose tall windows and skylight flood in sunlight from every direction. I am writing to you from a new bed that’s as soft as my mother’s belly, under sheets as pink as a rose quartz. I am writing to you as a woman who is looking in the mirror and bearing witness to the surprising and exquisite beauty of joy slowly, tenderly replanting itself into once-scorched earth.

I am writing to you as a woman and her Chi who have chosen to hope. Because hope is the seed that will birth everything that will save us.