Godesses

She wasn't always this way, and she has to remind herself of this fact each day as she pushes down her panic. It's become an unfamiliar existence; the mundane small lifeboats scattered in the tumult, made up of routine and normalcy, are now few and far between, and the sense of drowning is as tangible as the pills she takes to block out the day.

He is always downstairs, and the rage and wallowing engulf the rooms of her beautiful house, she can feel it creeping up the stairs, and even when she is playing with her children, she is suppressing the desire to scream- to scream into her pillow, to scream into the void, to scream into his face.

It wasn't always this way, she tells her friends, most of them too new to know differently. They didn't get to see her at Open Mic nights, her guitar a beacon in the dark for college students along the eastern seaboard. They were not there to witness as she scrabbled up towering mountains in Utah, faster than the men in her climbing group, stronger than the mountain lions who roamed the desert below. They were not around to see as day after day, she drove a needle into her flesh, tears of frustration buried in her desire to become a mother. They don't know that she is larger than her life. Except three of them, women she met after he had begun to drop his mask. They had come into her life unexpectedly, each in a rather everyday sort of way, and yet, they were now her sisters, and they knew.

She has been a prisoner in these walls for weeks, perhaps decades, there was no way of knowing, but hope had begun to fade and she was growing tired of watching her tears circle the drain at night after the children were in bed. She would crouch on the shower floor, watching as the water swirled over her chipped toenail polish, and that would be her tether as she allowed herself to fall.

The bags have been packed since last Monday. At first, it was a pipe dream, a way of building a metaphorical rope with which to descend from her tower, but as the days have passed, she has begun to repack with fervor, and a zest that fills her with a surging balloon of longing. And once hers have been filled, she begins to pack for the children, A stuffed animal for each, a selection of books, pajamas for cold nights and pajamas for warm. The bags get bigger, and the rope begins to feel longer, and she is running out of room to hide the suitcases, stashing them in corners throughout the house. For years, she has put away ten percent of her paycheck, thinking it would be for college, or perhaps a vacation. And now she knows it is for a gift. One that only she can give herself, and if she doesn't do it soon, she will lose her nerve.

Her phone is chiming with a text, and looking at the screen, it is as if a switch has been engaged. Her screen simply says, "Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing". An inspirational quote sent by her Yogi friend, who somehow manages to turn zen into an annoyance most days, but who, today, has lit a fire.

It is after midnight when she hears him begin to snore on the couch downstairs. It takes seven trips to load her minivan, a car that has lived through so many of the phases of her life, its battle scars prominent and proud. The suitcases fill all but the children's seats, and as she gazes at the empty spaces, she is, for the first time that evening, tickled with doubt. She could write a novel with her what ifs, an etude with her remorse, a sonnet with her terror. But still, she moves on, because the choice not to no longer seems an option.

The children are confused when she wakes them, briefly her youngest son wonders if it is time for breakfast, her other son falls back to sleep immediately as his selt belt is fastened. But it is her daughter that fills her with a love so enormous, she finds her hands begin to shake. This beautiful girl who has grown into a woman, who has perfected the art of perfection, is looking at her mother like she sees her, and it is the first time since being sequestered in her home, that she feels seen.

The drive is quiet, the twinkling lights of her town fading as a bookend of her life, and the road, dusty with snow, looms ahead. She has stopped twice along the way, once to pull cash from an account she will never own again, and another to send a group message to the friends she calls The Godesses. It is one sentence in length, but a million feelings at once, and she hasn't stopped again to read the responses.

It is late afternoon when she arrives at what she hopes to be her other bookend. The icy roads have graduated to a sandy beach, with miles on either side of her, anonymous and grand. The four weary travelers emerge from their cocoon into the sunshine, and without speaking a word, remove their shoes to walk into the waves, their footprints lost almost as soon as they are made, and she thinks to herself that there is a metaphor in that, but she is too tired to puzzle it through. They doze throughout the afternoon,

eating ice cream on the boardwalk for dinner. And it is as the sun begins a violently beautiful descent into the water, that the goddesses arrive. It has been many moons since they last saw each other, but as it always seems to happen, it is as if no time has passed at all.

The four goddesses sit together in the sand, while the children frolic with the fireflies. Their shadows, long and lean and powerful, soon melt into one.