A Year Out

I woke and showered and readied for work,
but I don’t remember what I ate or whether
I ate. I think I was bracing myself, knew
what was coming, but who can know,
and I can only speak from retrospect, it’s all
I have in this moment. I might not have eaten.
I might have dreamed the night before,
but that I don’t know that, either. So much
of this process is understanding which facts
matter. It matters that my daughter was in
her second week of second grade, precise age
she’ll never know again. Does it matter
that she carried the bag she wore to school
before that morning, and for many days after,
and that he bought it for her? I might recall
the bag bouncing against her legs as she ran,
the sun reflected white on her blond skull,
or I might have made it up, but regardless,
I know that one morning about a year ago
after my former partner tried to assault us,
I went to a shelter, and then, I told my story
to a judge, and more, I said what happened
to anyone who would listen. It’s true, of course,
but so much more is true, like any big feeling
barely contained, there is this tenuous
courting of disaster behind it. Even so,
a story took shape, solidified. So what
if it was only adrenaline, the heat I felt course
through me, my arms frozen to the chair,
my legs crossed, for months, the shallow
breaths I took as I loaded the dishwasher
or taught a class, packed a sandwich or applied
for tenure. I gave up my words to advocates
a few hours after it happened, offered them forth
to build a story, in the rounded longhand
of the woman who wrote it down for me, for
the judge, yes, but also the person in the chair
who had to go home that night and protect
her daughter. I’m no fool. What really happened
is true but also manufactured. A document.
A year since I first began that delicate
piecework, that shaping, I can bend my story
at will. Flimsy, made up of sensations I pulled
from my deeper parts, and a year out, I want
to access that realm of my body, my insensible,
living-outside-of-narrative self, more than
posture or breath but the part of me that
moves or stays still, that acts. The self
returned from elsewhere that says, you are safe.
It’s August, a year later, and broiling hot.
Before sense retreats, I let the sun touch me.