vignettes of sadness
To walk along the street at sundown with a slice of pizza in your hand and feel sad.
To scoop dinner out of the slow cooker, engulfed by the billowing steam of rosemary and stock, and feel sad.
To wake in the early morning, tangled in a bed sheet with a book pressed open on the pillow beside you, and feel sad.
~
Last week, in a dream, I watched my little self whisper secrets to a towering spotted gum. I stood there in my school uniform and spoke truth into her knots, handing over each sentence one by one, for safekeeping.
Her limbs bowed in the wind and I heard her reply: I will give these back to you when you are well enough to carry them.
In Braided Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us’.”
And so the tree has given back the bundle.
It is wet and soggy.
It is a parcel of sadness.
~
I bought a painting years ago, of a little girl holding up her hands to the sky. In white pencil, scribbled in the artist’s non-dominant hand are the words:
Nature will fill you where those who loved you did not.
Standing in the gallery in Blackheath, the painting did not make sense to me. But I felt something. So I handed over my money and left, the frame wedged under the crook of my arm.
~
I used to see a therapist every Tuesday afternoon. The first time I cried in her office she sat there pressed against the back of her velvet chair with her arms crossed.
“I’m going to sit here in silence and I want you to keep crying for 15 minutes.”
She taught me a valuable lesson in the months that I saw her: You cannot categorise emotion. Every emotion deserves acknowledgement. They are neither good, nor bad. They just are. Welcome them.
~
Crying at the cafe between mouthfuls of corn frittatas. His face contorted, uncomfortable.
“No, no. This is great, this is fine!” I say, grinning, waving him off.
"I’m so sad! It feels so good to feel sad!”
~
The words: Come on, pick yourself up. You’re not dying, are you? No one likes a wallower.
~
Face down on the massage table.
“When someone massages my hands it feels really safe and warm,” I muffle into the towel.
The therapist pushes tension from my calves, my quads, my glutes, my lower back up and down my arms, out to my hands.
The emotion swells in my wrists until she releases it out of each fingertip. I heave with sobs, covering my face in the moisture of tears and sweat and snot.
“This feels so nice for me,” I cry, while she whispers words of strength and courage into the small of my back.