Wash Over Me
Photo Credit: Simon Yamauchi
By Equality Rider Chelsea Fullerton
As of today, we are twenty days in to our journey…
twenty days – feels like an eternity, my heart bound up in the minutes and hours I’ve spent
laughing and crying and talking and writing and pushing myself and trying
not to feel
because feeling means that I could be weak,
lose hold of the fragile exterior that indicates what’s inside of me is at peace
when reality is that the ground I’m standing on is shaking,
threatening to break.
And each day, I feel the weight of each moment -
stories, woven and spun with the thread of the souls of the oppressed,
forming the fabric of the ragged tapestry we call this life.
I carry the words, tuck them in the deepest recesses of my mind,
telling myself I’ll have time to comb through them later.
So here they sit, in a tangled mess of identity and pain and belonging and exclusion and fear
waiting to be loosened,
waiting to be understood.
The unraveling begins today
as the words wash over me like a thundering cascade,
testing the limits of what my shoulders can bear.
Let’s not talk about inclusion, they say.
Let’s find some middle ground, some way to keep them silent
while convincing ourselves that love is made of straight lines,
confines that keep out those who can’t fit inside our limited minds.
Hatred is a part of religion, a necessary defense
to separate us from them,
so let’s reduce them to sin
to indulged temptation
to nothing.
I am drenched with the weight of each drop.
But there are some quiet moments that drown out the downpour,
when the fire in my heart becomes brighter and more fierce than any storm.
I breathe,
drinking in the smoke that absorbs the words and carries them away into oblivion.
I sigh,
letting it wash over me like a wave,
with fingers so gentle and a touch so imperceptible that I wonder:
how many times have I missed these moments
of cleansing, healing, unwinding and rebinding
because I have not been willing to feel them?
About the Blogger:
An advocate and ally from Athens, GA, Chelsea wholeheartedly believes in the fundamental worth of all people and strives to empower them to gain the tools and opportunities that they need to find meaning in life.
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