She Doesn't Leave Without It

La Loba is the part of me that goes back.

Not forward — back. Back into the terrain I left behind, the parts of myself I set

down because they didn’t fit, because they frightened me, because the

institution had no use for them, because I didn’t yet know what they were

worth. She is the one who remembers where I buried things.

She collects me. The version of me that knew things intuitively before I

learned to distrust that knowing. The hunger I called too much. The wildness I

called unprofessional. The grief I called weakness. The call I ignored for

twenty years because I couldn’t yet afford to hear it.

The singing is what happens when I stop arguing with what I find. That

moment of yes. That is the song.

She doesn’t wander looking for what others discarded. She wanders looking

for what I discarded. And she does not leave without it.

 

The first time I saw the desert, I smiled.

Not at anyone. To myself. The kind of smile you can’t manufacture.

No one knew where I was. No one could find me. And what I felt wasn’t relief.

It was recognition.

I had been somewhere before that I couldn’t name. And then I was standing in

it.The desert doesn’t soften anything. The light is full and it doesn’t negotiate.

What can’t survive the heat doesn’t. What remains is what was always real —

the bone, the stone, the thing that held its shape when everything else fell

away.

I’ve spent a long time building a life from a blueprint that wasn’t mine. The

desert has no such requirement. It doesn’t ask me to justify my presence. It

doesn’t ask me anything.

I go in and I lose the version of me that was assembled for other people’s

comfort. I don’t mourn her. She was always the temporary one.

What’s left is older. It knows things I can’t account for knowing. It moves at a

different pace. It is not in a hurry.

I didn’t find the desert. I remembered it.

I don’t know how else to say it. I arrived and I already knew where I was.

I look at this image the way I look at a dream.

Not what does it mean. What is it asking me.

And when I sit with it honestly, the question that surfaces is the one I’ve been

circling for a while now.

What am I finally ready to see clearly.

Not what I’ve survived. I know what I’ve survived. Not what I’ve kept when

others would have let it go. I know that too.

This is different. This is the moment after the long carrying. After the desert

heat and the years and the stripping away of everything that wasn’t essential.

The skull is in the light now.

My body goes still. Something quiets. Time does something different.

Just the bone. Just the light. Just what’s actually true.

That’s the hardest thing. Not the carrying. Not the wandering. Not even the

descent.

The willingness to see clearly what you’ve been holding.

My arms rise. The light comes through.

Delicate. Durable. Both, at once, without apology.

It is fragile in my hands — I can feel that. The porousness of it, the places

where time has thinned it. And it has outlasted everything soft about the

creature it belonged to. The flesh, the breath, the weight of a living body

moving through the world. All of that is gone. This remains.

That is not a small thing to hold.

There is strength in it. And stillness inside the strength. Not the stillness of

something inert — the stillness of something that has already been through

the worst of it and came out the other side as bone.

My hands know this before I do.That’s what I mean when I say recognition. It isn’t a thought. It isn’t me standing outside the moment and analyzing it. Something in me meets something in the bone and the introduction is already over. We already know each other.

I am kneeling in the dirt.

The sun is on my back. The earth is warm and old beneath me.

And I am holding something that is both the most fragile thing I’ve touched

and the most enduring. Something that should not have survived and did.

Something that looks like ending and isn’t.

My body understands that before my mind has a word for it.

It always does.

I had to travel to get there.

I don’t remember what happened right before. I just remember what it felt like.

A womb.

Dark and held and older than anything I could name. The water, the rocks, the

low light — none of it felt like outside. It felt like interior. Like I had gone far

enough into the landscape that the landscape became me.

I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t afraid.

I was bare feet on stone and I was completely still and something was

happening that I wasn’t directing.

And then she arrived.Not dramatically. That’s the thing about her. She doesn’t announce herself. She

doesn’t perform. She simply — is. Present behind the eyes. Looking out from a

place that has stopped needing anything from anyone.

The crone.

My crone. Not the archetype in a book. Mine. The one who has been waiting

for me to stop being so busy, so useful, so afraid of being seen as too much or

not enough.

She looked out through my eyes at whatever was in front of me and she was

not impressed or unimpressed.

She was just there.

Unhurried. Undefended. Done with what doesn’t matter.

I found her that day.

Or she let me find her.

I’m not sure there’s a difference.

She knows that the searching is over.

Not the work. The searching.