There is a girl who every time she sees my cabin, breaks down crying. She grabs her chest, grips her breasts, falling to her knees and weeps. She loves it here. She’s a woman actually, not a girl, but she feels small and insignificant like although she is technically alive, one day she stopped progressing. Like maybe she didn’t deserve to age like the rest of them so she stopped. Truth be told, I have never actually invited her in.
I built this house for her. I said I built it for others, but it was for her. I assumed she knew that but.
She has never been inside.
I think she loves it because she aches for home. She feels the swirling patterns of the wind in the front yard and she sees the brown leaves it picks up in its arms, and she hears a song by Iron and Wine and she thinks of the man she will send that song to when he’s away and she will tell him he is her home. And earthside, he is. He is the same as the song by Iron and Wine, and the wind and dead leaves, and the blurry idea she has of this cabin as she stands outside it weeping.
I think she weeps because she feels relief and relief feels like grief. She weeps like a woman that is safe. She pays no mind to the fact that she is not invited in. She thinks not of wolves or strange men in the forest. She weeps as though she has lost everything, or that there is no such thing as loss, maybe.
She is not often in my front yard. She does not often haunt my window like the dead. More often, she is driving around an unexplored neighborhood at night with gas she does not have. She sobs about how beautiful the porch lights are. And twinkle lights and garden lights and streetlights. They give her a little relief.
More often, she is buying a cup of ice cream with strawberries and chocolate fudge for seven dollars even though that is a painful price for a cup of ice cream and she should save her money. It gives her a little relief.
More often, she is taking a phone call from her best friend, or maybe her oldest friend, or her love.
More often, she is checking the weather app to see if it says “rain” or “thunderstorm warning” even though she has a shift to work and can’t go outside.
More often she is making a cup of coffee that will hurt her stomach. It offers a little relief, in theory.
Sometimes, without being able to explain why, a person goes dumb with pain and mourning.
If splitting yourself into two people and watching one weep at your window allows you to act with some self-compassion, then split them. Because I have been thinking about a little relief lately. Reliefs that are borrowed. Reliefs that are bought on credit. That run out. That shouldn’t be used.
Two years ago I wrote this same post, basically, except it was about banana splits. I wrote it because there were dead dogs littering the roads in a town I refuse to claim as mine. And there were dogs starving in public parks and people would throw things at them instead of helping. Puppies left to drown in drainage ditches with their broken-down puppy-mill-mothers. And our neighbors shot their Blue Heeler because he chewed the cords on their boat. And they left him for dead in a blizzard. And because I spent five days a week at a struggling animal shelter. And because someone I lived with watched animals screaming and being tortured online with a mixture of rage and grief for them and wouldn’t turn the videos off even when I begged because there was nowhere I could go to escape it. Any of it. But I wrote to you about a banana split because I didn’t want to be alive and I didn’t want to say that and I didn’t want to write about ugliness.
You take your little relief. You go ahead and watch Moomin Valley or play Minecraft or read a silly book or buy yourself a seven-dollar coffee because we will come out of these times if we don’t succumb to them. Things can get better later.
You know, that man that the woman loves, he caught her a dying firefly. It died in his hands before he dropped it into hers.
The dead firefly glowed for a few more hours.
Take your little relief.
—Mabel
To All My Strangers 