Will there be an answer?

on molting, loss, and letting it be

Dear reader,

It is my first August in Colorado. Crickets make night music. Afternoon storms turn the sky navy-gray, a gothic contrast against the yellow plains. We are harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, oregano, and lemon balm. Joe is cooking kimchi and I am sewing a quilt. Apples fall small and tart from my client’s trees. My body craves rest and my mind reflection, getting ready, I think, for the next two, slower seasons. For silence, snow, and slowness.

Photo by Lasclay on Unsplash

I have missed writing Snail Mail.

I have missed teaching and practicing yoga.

I have missed my Texas friends and family.

40 hour weeks in the sun exhaust me.

I have gotten no closer to cracking the code of how to survive as an artist in a capitalist world. It seems I must trade writing and yoga for financial security or trade financial security for writing and yoga. Time impoverishment is a mindset maze I’ve yet to find my way out of. My tea tags keep quoting Paul McCartney there will be an answer, let it be. I am working on trust.

Caterpillars molt five times during their lives. They walk out of their old skin suits and into newer, bigger ones. Ones that can hold all that they are becoming. After molting, they eat their old skin. It nourishes them; becomes a part of who they are.

Maybe I am molting. Again and again until one day I have wings.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Last month, Joe and I found out we were pregnant. For two weeks, we made space in our relationship for a change unlike any we’d known before. Our child was the size of a poppy seed. We were joyful. We were anxious. We wondered when to tell our loved ones. We wondered whether we could afford feeding another mouth. We searched for doctors and researched hospitals. Then, even faster than their arrival, our child left. With cramps and blood and prayers, I miscarried. On the first sonogram of my life, in grainy black and white, I saw a cyst, not a baby.

The loss is a strange and tender one. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriages, but most are hushed, kept private. Like breakups, the grief is so personal, it’s almost embarrassing. Embarrassing to admit hope, how pitiful it looks now. Embarrassing love, fruitless. Embarrassing to realize longing, real and ready and unfulfilled. Another past skin swallowed whole.

I don’t blame anyone who hides their miscarriage story. It hurts to announce death while others announce life.

Here is what I work to trust:

We are bigger now,

capable of holding

more. Every loss, every

failure, every change

is food. We are

molting again

and again

and then also

again

until one day

we have wings

Where are you looking for answers, reader? Where are you letting things be?

Until next time,

With love,

A

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www.annaadami.com