Photo: Maggie Grace Photography
It was a Monday, but not the kind of Monday that comes to mind for most. We spent Sunday night is a heated argument. I honestly don’t even know what started it, except that my own struggles of feeling unseen by the world and by myself were boiling right under the surface and the lid was about to blow. It was never his fault. If anything he is the reason I finally acknowledged it as the truth. He is the person who gave me the match to finally light my own flame. I needed that spark, but that night I wanted to use my fire to burn him. I don’t know why, I just know that I wanted to scream and yell just to make sure that my voice still worked. Years of trying to play small and not make any waves made me wonder if my voice could even be heard over the ocean inside my mind.
Somehow I felt lost at sea and also finally on course all at the same time. Like a boat whose sails finally caught the wind, but didn’t quite know how to stay the course. Like a bird whose wings caught the wind, but didn’t quite know how to fly.
Anyway we woke up Monday, but it wasn’t over. It took a while to climb through all the wreckage of our words, but we got there… like we always do. And on the other side we found something beautiful, a safe haven that felt like the warm blanket of all the most true words we needed, wrapped around us to hold our hearts together just where they were always meant to be. It felt good and neither one of us was ready to let it go, so we went to the place that always makes us happiest and we sipped lattes and dipped our ginger cookies in the foam.
Then he looked at me and said, we need to remember this, we need something to bring us back here anytime we are feeling like we’ve lost our way. I agreed - something to bring us back home, like the North Star. He nodded and then his eyes lit up and he said, “lets get tattoos!”
I didn’t have a tattoo and the old me would never just do something like that on a whim, but in that moment I felt no hesitation. A North Star to always bring us back home to ourselves, our truest selves and to each other in that safe space that holds us close together. So we went right then and did it and it felt like exactly what we needed.
Who knew that just a few weeks later it would be exactly what we would need every single day to get us through what was coming. A daily reminder that even though our world was turned upside down, we can still find our way back our safe place, our home, together.
