Reservoir

Yesterday I had a new image come to mind.

I have been like a reservoir. Full of water -for me, the water is pain and maybe words- that has been held back. All the while the pain’s been held back, so has the healing. The hidden constraint in the word- ‘reserv(e)oir’ – that I had never noticed before adds to the perfect-ness of the image for me. I have been silent. Reserved. Silenced for decades by shame, and by those who blamed me for what they themselves had done or failed to do. I believed them. I believed I was to blame. I held back from public view the rivers of tears I cried onto the neck of my little egg yolk-yellow chick. I made her in Brownies, called her Kitty. She was absorbent, to the point of coming unglued from the persistence of my grief. The red thread I used to sew her head back on made me think of blood. I apologised to her as I sewed crooked stitches.

Kitty has gone. The dam has burst. The reservoir cannot hold me now. The grief is un-pent. Or, as I realised yesterday, maybe unspent.

Either way, the grief and the words and the End of Silence is pouring out. And for the first time, I am not going to stop it.