Do you understand what swamp water is?

Maybe we’ll get there.

I think it was the first woman to hate me in my sanctuary who commented on the emptiness of my eyes, and, even then, I knew she was right. I’ve never been dead inside but the vacuum between emotion and expression is enough to suck the life out of anyone less dedicated. I’m still not interested. I feel it more lately, the pressure difference between the joy in my smile and the light my eyes are swallowing. I’ve never been dead inside but I’ve never lied about the graveyard in my chest.

A million words on the oceans inside of women, their depths and tempests. I raise my palms and worship this goddess gift, the multifaceted ferocity of the feminine.

I watch myself becoming a sort of inland sea- slowing down and spreading out. A meandering, deliberate carving of landscapes around me, dissolving banks and softly flooding arteries meant to contain me. The longer water settles, the greater the saturation becomes. Common sense says standing water is a negative: bugs grow there. Bacteria, mold, mildew. Death.

Death, the Big Scary. The only thing more inevitable than my arrival is his, and here he sits in my marshlands, my shallow bayou inlets, feeding me the deaths I’ve needed to survive myself. He’s plucking these invasive growths that have choked my mind, the swarms and kudzu plaguing my soul, slipping them into this swamp, eyes always on mine. Maybe that is the emptiness she’d seen- the intimacy of these moments, this Death inside me. He’s fueling my world engine. I feel this, the grief of letting go, the pain of new growth. Water moving this slow, I have become primordial, but there will be no magical lightning strike to force evolution and my Death is telling me it’s almost time for him to go.

And I’ll be on my own.

I’ll know him when he comes again, and I will be able to show him how I’ve grown since then. Since he came to save my life with me. I’ll be smiling with all my light, and I’ll be something we could be proud of, the violent greens and the riot of life I will have left behind me. And, yeah, I’m scared but that will never stop me again. I have a legacy to carve into this land, me and my sunlit swamp water eyes, never forgetting it takes a lot of death to bring this kind of thing to life.