Boulders

In December of 2024 I left MN to spend 2 months in California. Just before I left, I found my Mother Wound; a heavy, dark boulder that lives inside my chest and weighs heavy on my abdomen.“Any wound but the mother wound” I said to myself, writhing on the couch in my air bnb, crying and gasping for air, “I would take any wound over the mother wound.” The pain is felt beyond any words I could ever find. Heavy in my chest, sick-to-my-stomach, ‘please erase me from the earth”, twisted tight like a towel mid-wringing, physical, cutting pain. Though I may try, it is indescribable.

My mom carries one, too, and her mom, and her grandma and all the generations before.

While I was in California at the beginning of 2025, I held it and wished I could crack it open. I wished I could yank it from my mother's chest and throw it off a mountain. She may never understand how deep her wounds are or where they came from. She may never have the chance, or the drive, to turn some of the rocks into sand, and it breaks my heart. She didn't deserve this heavy, silent, gut-wrenching sadness, and neither did I, but this curse wasn't hers to break. It's mine.

I wrote this 'song' for her. For me, my little sisters and all the daughters and children with sore shoulders from carrying backpacks full of rocks they never asked for. And I wrote the passage below to help me make sense of the insidiousness of the centuries of the existence of these boulders.

1.5.25

Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. A boulder spends centuries rested on a precipice like it’s been preparing for its tumble since the beginning of time. Wedged between bigger and smaller boulders, camped out on shelves of sediment, lethal in its own right, stoic and stunning under sunlight. Where centuries of waiting have done their weathering, winds whipping through the ages. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. Before us, there were boulders, destined to leap and bound across the canyons, stumble through the baggage of the earth and put out the fires making fountains on their surface. Make their mark and keep it moving, dig in & sit still wherever they land; boulders don’t argue with God. They don’t move the mountains, they make the mountains,  they are the mountains, and the chips always fall where they may. 

Bearing witness to generations, a boulder learns to fit in the palms of hands, take deep breaths, lay down to rest, still waiting for a net to appear, and a gust of reassuring wind to knock it off its feet. But there’s no falling from a closed fist. And so it sits, across lifetimes, across blood lines. Heavy like all the time it spent sitting this still wasn’t in vain. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. 

That weight can take your breath away, sunshine bouncing off the top of its head, stretched up past the sky, rocky ridges like staggering towers that could swallow you whole. Holding hostages with no handcuffs, to be witnessed, felt and formidable. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. Resting behind the small trenches of the rib cage, rattling around, loud, restless friction lodged in front of smoldering wounds.  Gray like white sand when it’s under the moon, embers at its center, cold around the edges, a boulder of the ages that doesn’t know better than to stay put and sit still. Boulders don’t argue with God.

And life goes on. The chips fell in my arms.

Sometimes the boulder feels like

Fine, black, packed sand, a boulder wrapped in bubblegum, heavy like a million tons of wasted time, of the years spent chasing some kind of relief for the aches in my veins. It’s a home I inherited and can’t afford, dusty, worn out, empty, cavernous rooms, and a darkness like the new moon. No windows, no front door, no back door, no trap door, just an endless, undone, merciless cavity. An old, run-down shack of whispers from generations before who never lived there long enough to fix it up. Forgotten, familiar, ours, mine. If these walls could talk, they’d just weep to pass the time. Plastered in unrelenting quiet, if these walls could talk, they'd scream until they go blind.

It’s not a pleasant place. I feel like half my being lives there and half of it is struggling to find its way back from right down the block. I feel it all over my torso and just underneath my skin– this nagging, gut-wrenching longing to get home. An all-consuming, sick-to-my-stomach, breathless kind of fear, that even if I make it, it still won’t ever feel safe there, that it could burn to a crisp any minute, that it would get swallowed up by the earth with me still in it. It’s a strip of skin from my throat to my gut that I wish I could rip off like a bandaid. It gets so hot in here I get the chills, my outer layer steaming and growing thin. There’s a part of me stuck there, clinging to the ceiling, desperate to be found. Wishing wholeheartedly that I will one day return with enough stuff to make this place a home, to finally feel whole. 

She’s never seen the outside. She’s spent her whole life breathing restless air, daydreaming about what’s out here and convinced it would find its way in soon enough. She'd only leave over her dead body. All this waiting will be worth it, she’s sure of it. What she’s meant to have, she is certain is coming. And the only way to make it out alive is to wait and see if someone comes to save you. If you don’t wait, they will never come. If you don’t stay put in the darkness, counting your blessings, building a shelter of hopes and dreams, setting yourself on fire to light up the corners and send smoke signals, they will never come. If you don’t pace back and forth, walk laps around this empty room, keep tally of all the times you tried to find the door and failed, bite your fingernails and pray that what you’re meant to have will bust down the bricks to come find you. 

If you don’t wait, they will never come. 

The Waves of Grief

Grief comes in waves, yes, but never in stages like everybody says. Grief comes in a spiral, finding its way back to you over and over and over, year after year after year, sometimes deeper, sometimes smaller, but most certainly, it will always come back. It lives here, in the tissues, coming and going, running in circles, up and down the layers and layers of heartbreak. It comes in waves, yes, and in buckets of shame and sadness, in flickers of hope, and gut punches of wanting anything other than this part of you to be missing.  

And if it’s right down the block with cold shoulders and a drug problem, it’ll lodge itself in deeper tissues, embalmed in an excruciating longing for what could have been and what still could be. Because it still could be. 

Because it still could be, it hangs in the air all the time, a humid, hazy, crystalized cruelty, the dull colors of the world, heavy like its shadow is tied to the ends of your feet. It’s all-consuming and often unannounced; the cycles of grief are ancient, their wisdom needs no introduction. It comes in waves, yes, and it comes in droves and whispers and peeks at the possibility that what’s been lost can always be found again. 

It comes in waves on drowsy, rush hour drives, in street sign after street sign on the route you follow every night, before and after but still every time. And as it makes its way back home again, it runs its hands through the branches of every bush, dances its fingertips on flower petals and fence poles, counting sidewalk cracks and wanting so badly to turn around and turn back time. It’s a hopelessness that echoes down the alleyways, bouncing back and forth off garage doors, sprawling itself over every pebble and pothole, then reaching for the sky. 

And the sound, its song– it, too, comes in waves, and in silent moments, loaded with the pain of not knowing. But it does know, deeply, the kind of death that’s void of certainty. It replays memories, rewrites them and writes new ones about everything that could be. Because it still could be. 

There is hope yet to be had even riding the most treacherous waves. Grief is a captain of loyalty and faith and rises the most high for impossible occasions. There is a sickness on the sea that has no remedy but to throw on a life jacket, hold on and hope the ocean is co-conspiring with the universe to toss you toward the shore before the tide rolls in. The sun still bounces atop walls of water that are too tall to climb. It still shines on the face of the precarious, expectant and determined gusts of wind that keeps your sails out of the water. Knot after knot after knot, may we never get to the end of the rope, may we never be chosen to pull the anchor back onto the boat when the time has come to give the breeze back control. Because the time has come to let go. Because we’re the only ones meant to make it back to the beach. 

Grief comes waves, yes, and it rests on the tips of the toes that have shown up to greet them, gripping the sand, holding their hands. The tide rolls up and back and knows it could take you out, conspire with the current– at any moment you could drown. 

Grief walks the shoreline, admiring dried up castles, soggy strings of seaweed, shells filled up with memories and washed up what-could-be's. 

Because it still could be. 

Because it still could be, it fills its pockets with trash and treasures, dirty fingernails and pruning palms wrapped tightly around all these gifts it hopes to offer, to lay down at the ocean’s altar, a prayer that the storms will only make us all stronger. A prayer for all the ones that we can be sure we’ll chase after. A prayer that the lost ones will keep their heads above the water. 

Grief comes in waves, yes, and they will always rise again after their arms take us under.