This poem goes through all the stages of my life. The good, the bad and the ugly. In the end I have hope. That is where I stand today - in HOPE
I died when I was nine years old
I didn’t tell anyone I was dead
I still walked around
Went to school
Played
Survived
But I was not alive
I don’t know how long I was dead
Different parts of me came back to life at different times
But I would not say I was alive
I was just learning how to survive
When I was in high school, a part of me awoke
John made me feel present
Together we enjoyed the moment
He, for one, was never my opponent
In my twenties I learned to live through books, friends, drinking
I wasn’t fully dead then either
Always hungry for life
But never thirsty
I learned tricks to come alive
But I never felt anything
Until my mom got cancer
Then I sought out answers
Unfortunately the answer came like a bullet
She told me
She had two cancers
And I was one of them
No worse dagger to condemn
A child
For life
I ran away in my thirties
To see if maybe my body was alive in another country
She was there
Looking for love
Too bad I had to travel 4,664 miles to open up my heart
But I was drying for love
In that death, I found life
A life I could live with
I traveled the world alone and as a pair
I rode a camel to come to life
We toured the underground Cistern
We walked the dessert
We drank wine in Tallinn
We shopped in Warsaw
We swam in the Caribbean Sea
We discovered our native past
We spa-ed
We took vows – twice
I tried so hard to be a person worth living for and with
I wanted our pair to become a full house
I wanted life to come from within
But nothing can grow in a graveyard
A body broken stays broken when the patient doesn’t know how to put herself back together
No matter how many needles, drugs, surgeries one has
Doctors can not fix a dead body
I learned you can not wish a life of happiness
You have to be happy to give happy
But I tried for so long
Long enough to create two pairs, but not a full house
A house cannot stand on a faulty foundation
A house of cards always falls
I died again under the rubble of my house
I was fifty when I died for the third time
I ran away again
To get away from the rubble
But eventually I returned to find that
Unattended rubble becomes the embers of cremation
Once cremated
You cannot come back to life as you were
You need to be reincarnated
As something new
Something true
I stand here now
Trying to ignite embers
So someone remembers
Me
I want to be a Phoenix
Set free
In that new life
I want to talk to my past lives
I want to hug the nine-year-old girl
Tell her she is loved, and is loveable
I want to sit for a drink with the twenty-year-old young woman
Tell her she is smart, strong, worthy, not a cancer
That was not the right answer
I want to fly with the thirty-year-old
Tell her to express herself, take off the muzzle that others placed on her
I want to take the forty-year-old to a Sharma
Tell her she can grow without fear
I want to slowly walk down the middle path with the fifty-year-old
Tell her healing is possible
Happiness comes from within first
She is done with the worst
Dying is ok
Living is ok
You can do them both
But to break the cycle
You must open your heart
And hug yourself
From within
To begin
To birth an identical twin
And shred your original sin