What I Killed to Survive

A lullaby. For the one I had to put down. With love. It was with love. I need you to know it was with love.

---

Hush now.

I know you didn't want to go. I know you were still in the middle of something, still reaching for the thing you thought was coming, still soft in all the places the world had not yet made its opinions known.

I know.

I was there.

I was the one holding the pillow.

---

I buried you on a Tuesday, which feels right, which feels like the honest day for an honest crime, for the quiet, necessary act of a girl who understood before she had the vocabulary that the self who feels everything is not a self the current environment can afford.

You were expensive.

You cost me rooms.

You cost me the safety of being small enough to go unnoticed, and unnoticed was the only kind of safe on offer,

so I put you down the way you put down something beloved that cannot survive the conditions,

with my whole hands,

with my eyes open,

with the specific grief of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and does it anyway because the alternative is both of you not making it out.

One of us had to go.

I chose you.

I'm sorry.

I chose you.

---

Here is what I buried with you:

The crying that came too easily and too publicly and at the wrong times, at the times that made rooms turn their attention like a spotlight you did not audition for.

The wanting. God, the wanting. The enormous, ungovernable, completely unreasonable wanting of a child who did not yet know that want was the evidence they'd use against you.

The questions. You asked so many questions. You thought questions were welcome. You thought the asking was the whole point.

You were right.

That's why they had to go.

The things that were right were the first things to bury.

---

I wrapped you in the good things too.

This is what they don't tell you about this kind of burial: you can't separate the damage from the whole. You can't excise the wound without taking the body with it.

So I buried the damage and I buried the joy and I buried the laugh that started before it was polite and the kindness that gave itself away before confirming the recipient deserved it and the love, the enormous, structurally unsound, architecturally irresponsible love of a child who had not yet been taught that love requires load-bearing assessment before distribution.

I buried all of it.

I tamped the earth down with both feet.

I said: stay.

Stay down.

I cannot carry you and survive this place.

I will come back for you.

I will come back.

---

I did not come back.

Not for years.

Not until the place I had been surviving was behind me, until the rooms that required your absence were rooms I had left, until the conditions that made the burial necessary were conditions that no longer applied.

I went back to the grave.

I brought flowers, which was either ritual or guilt and I have decided it was both and both are allowed.

I knelt in the dirt.

I said: I'm sorry.

It was the only way I knew.

It was with love.

I need you to know it was with love.

---

Here is the part I have to tell you:

The grave was disturbed.

Not dramatically. Not the split earth of a horror story, not the cinema of resurrection.

Just: slightly disturbed.

The dirt with the look of dirt that has been moved from the inside.

Just slightly.

Just enough.

---

She's not entirely dead.

Of course she isn't.

Of course the thing I buried with my whole hands and my eyes open and the specific grief of a necessary act did not have the decency to stay buried, because she was always the part of me that refused the conditions even when I had accepted them, that kept reaching even when I had stopped, that believed in the coming back even when I said I would not come back.

She believed me anyway.

She waited.

She is not entirely dead.

---

She surfaces sometimes in the laugh that starts before it's polite.

In the questions.

In the wanting, the enormous, ungovernable, completely unreasonable wanting that I have spent decades learning to call by its right name, which is not weakness, which is not evidence to be used, which is the most alive thing I have left and the truest inheritance of the girl I put down on a Tuesday with my whole hands and my eyes open and love, it was love, I need her to know it was love,

and she does know.

She was always going to know.

She is the part of me that knows things before I do.

---

Hush.

You came back.

Of course you came back.

I built the whole survival on the bones of you and bones don't stay buried.

They become the structure.

They hold everything up.

You held everything up.

Even dead.

Especially dead.

I'm sorry it took this long to say thank you.

I'm saying it now.

Hush.

You can stop surviving.

We made it.

Both of us.

We made it out.