mourning moon

I loved you before I knew to love you. I whispered your name on the wind.

Lucia. Lucia Paz. Where are you?

The only thing I hold of you now is the grief, like a cast around my heart. I signed your name on it so many times, it became part of the love I feel for everything. Someone once asked me if you wrote it yourself, I said yes until I believed it.

I miss you. I miss your little head. And your beautiful everything. It is strange to feel lonely without someone you met only once, but I suppose I never met you, not really. I only knew you dead. That is just not the same.

The morning moon hung to the southeast this morning, perfect in its sliver. I felt the dawn inside of me. An awakening to something like solitude, not loneliness, but a learning to be alone. I am a hermit. An old soul. A crone. A holy woman, wild hair like a crown above my head. I cannot take in the flesh, and neither can I let the flesh go. I tear at it with my teeth, small bites for protein. I need strength to be alone. But it is a conflict. I let her flesh leave me. She was taken away to a room somewhere. Did they love her, the men that cut her open? Did they cry? Did they soothe her bruises? Did they pray? Did they know she was named Lucia?

I keep thinking I have written about her for the last time, but then I see the moon in the early morning. The way it winks as it wanes. The way it reminds me of time. And I write about her. Sometimes when I cannot escape myself, I find her. Kept secret behind the moon, playing hide and seek.

Find me, mama.

I am in the winter sky. I am in the early dawn. I am in your seclusion. I am not speaking through mediums and channels and charlatans. I am in the quiet. I am in the tears. I am etched in your skin. I am in the cough. I am the distance. I am the early morning. I am the birds. I am your baby. I am the forest through the trees. I am not here. I am everywhere.

You say you cannot find me, but you have been looking right at me. When you are on your knees, begging for peace, offering yourself to peace, that is where I am.