If my body was a house….

If my body was a house, I would be shuttering the windows right now, closing the doors around my heart and crawling under the quilts in the bedroom at the centre. This image is so present, as I detach myself day by day and slip inside to find the places where my anger has been nutured, and where no one else can touch it except for me. I want no consolation for this fester, I don’t want to be told it will all be over soon, I want no arm around my shoulder in my perfectly boarded up body.

This self-contained trauma belongs to no one else and in this I am self-righteous. This analytical outrage pores over documents until I litter the floor in shreds of paper. I am sick to the bottom of me when I read my life between the lines of these others, and howling when I come up for air.

And yet, I am comforted by these symptoms – relics of grief and process that will get me through the final few weeks of stress and allow me to become again with one more chapter completed. I revel in that hardness knowing that it will disappear as soon as it is no longer needed – I allow myself small leaks so I can stay unemotional when his jumpy voice comes over the line all hopped up on legal accusations and sentencing arguments.

It is certainly not the apocalypse that it once was; it is the last thing before the next. And the next will be a homecoming party in a not-so-distant future during which the doors will be unlocked and my windows opened wide.