I Miss the Wildflowers

In the house where I grew up, every spring brought hepatica, violets, and dandelions. Trilliums in the woods and honeysuckle on the woods’ border.

I didn’t like moving into an apartment for a lot of reasons, but missing the wildflowers was one of the hardest things to adjust to. We aren’t in an apartment anymore, and at least there will be dandelions. But it’s still not the same. 

We have plans to help deal with this loss. Paintings, cross stitch, embroidery on clothes. But plans are just plans when we’re still focusing on remembering who we are and how to love being alive. 

The first step, for me, is remembering to talk to the house. Or, if that’s too odd, loving the house the way that I want to. 

I’ve never been able to interact with anything from a perspective other than that of a relationship. This is one of the things that my mom and I were at odds about constantly, even though I don’t think she was aware of why I lost all motivation when I tried to work from her perspective. I needed to take the time to get to know the things I was interacting with – in schoolwork the books and paper, in cleaning the objects involved. She wanted me to be practical and efficient immediately, and I just…couldn’t. I needed to take the time to get to know the things I was using first.

I think, for me at least, it is connected to this need to pull as much joy into my life as possible. Especially when I was a kid, and I was going through the worst of the abuse that I experienced. If I wanted to retain my sense of self – this was, essentially, my self-expression, as it was the only constant that I knew I had – I needed to love as much as possible. 

It is difficult to love people who are hurting you. Important, in my opinion, for your own peace of mind, but difficult. Especially when they are teaching you that “loving them” means “doing what they say”, and “doing what they say” means “losing your sense of self”. 

I think it is important to love people so that you can let go of them and focus on being internally honest instead. But, again, it is difficult. It takes time and work, and I didn’t always have the energy to focus on this. Or the means, even, to focus on it. At least not without getting misled and sucked in to being a clone instead of letting go. 

So I focused on loving nature, objects, and stories. Especially stories. And our partner system, of course, but we were not around them as often as either of us would have liked. 

All of this is to say that if I am going to regain my routines and get the house in order, and if I am going to do it in a way that is helpful and healthy for me, rather than focused on beating myself up, I am going to have to return to the way of thinking that kept me alive as a kid. 

I wish that I had been more stubborn about my need to “talk” to things before using them. (It is difficult to describe. It is similar to the feeling of being grounded and aware of the presence of everything around you.) But I was not as stubborn as I should have been. I now rush to accomplish things as practically and efficiently as possible, even though I feel a sense of sadness and wrongness when I do this. 

It is going to take time for me to remember how to “talk to the house”. 

But I don’t mind. I don’t mind that the progress will be slow, because I get to be who I am again. I have not let myself focus on being who I really am for so long that I can’t even remember how I got to this place. Why did I stay with my abusers? Because I kept company with them for years and years after I became a legal adult, and I don’t understand myself. Yes, there was gaslighting, but it only got worse the longer that I stayed. I don’t understand why, after being so stubborn for my entire childhood, I just…stopped. 

I guess it doesn’t entirely matter. I am alive now, and I am healing now. I am not going to stop living, and I am not going to stop recalling who I truly am at my core.

-Marionette