Part of squaring the circle is coming back into the world. To be honest, it’s been really quiet here. The boys were here a lot over the summer, but now school’s back in session, and there are more hours to fill. I’ve been trying to find something to occupy me, let the spring-loaded alligator clips of my mind latch onto something, anything, but nothing is really taking. The sun is shifting, and the rustle of leaves on the sidewalk outside the newly opened windows sound like foot steps, a dark predator, an old and familiar friend.
My body started tensing up for no reason. Nothing is wrong. I know this. I tell myself this. I go over everything, time and time again. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. There is no crisis. At long last, there is no crisis.
But the body doesn’t listen. The body remembers, keeps the score. There was a trauma around this time, long, long ago. My autistic world was crushed by the real world, but I didn’t have the language or the knowledge to even comprehend what was happening at the time. I wasn’t autistic as a child because the word meant something different then. Words define reality, bend and shape it. I unearthed the trauma recently, and suddenly understood why Peter keeps dragging me back to 1982, pulling on my sleeve and pointing insistently. He speaks in the language of birds. My mother became a bird and flew away. When we found it, it was so brilliant and true, I can’t understand how I didn’t see it before.
We’ve healed, I tell the body. We got to the truth, cracking the bones with our jaws while the stars and moon watched. We now know, know so much more about ourselves. We are not bad. We are not broken. We are kintsugi, we are whole, we are the crown of creation. Self-love does not come easy, but it does come, with time. We have been doing the work, the hard work, the grieving, the coming to terms, the amends. We’ve been diffusing the traumas, letting them go. The flood may have washed everything away, but we’ve been growing anew, once again, like we do each time.
But the body doesn’t listen. And it dawned on me that it has been banging itself like a drum, each year, that this tension and anxiety that have been draped across me the past two weeks has been here all along. It’s the reason the sound of the leaves changes. And now it is true anxiety, the body engaging a flight or fight response over nothing, and refusing to listen to the truth.