The Peacemaker

Somewhere in the middle of 2007 I swallowed Rage whole. I can’t recall the hour or the day, only the place – among white brick barracks sitting on the easternmost edge of Ukraine, the ones we turned into a makeshift summer camp for orphans.

This was well before I knew my enneagram number: Nine, Peacemaker. The easygoing, self-effacing type. Complacent. Receptive and reassuringly agreeable. A fellow Nine from church asked how I dealt with my anger. I turned on him quick. “I’m not an angry person.”

I didn’t know then, my anger a leashed thing, a lion stalking among sunflowers, pacing with a growl low in its throat.

I was twenty back in 2007. I signed up to spend my summer volunteering at a Ukrainian orphanage so I could be teamed up with hot, philanthropic guys who’d obviously be instantly attracted to my selfless heart (and hot bod), and we’d have a lightning love affair beneath the heat of a foreign sun. If twenty years taught me anything in life, it was that a whole slew of hot, philanthropic guys were begging to spend their summers volunteering at quiet, nameless Ukrainian orphanages.

This was how I found myself on a small all-female team, preparing for a summer with limited food and water and maybe no showers and no phones and no means for communication back home and was I up-to-date on all my vaccinations and my mom asking are you sure but before I could answer the whole of an ocean beneath me.

When the plane touched down in Kyiv, I emerged swallowing spices in the borscht air, took a few gulps before boarding the six-hour bus. We drove past endless grids of fields, a patchwork quilt for giants, the land a sleepy thing, until we made it to the makeshift orphanage slumped against the side of Russia.

At the barracks the bus doors creaked open to four sagging caregivers and a hundred wide-eyed children. “Previet!” The children shouted it as they took me by the wrist, pulling friendship to their skin with starving hands. They took hold of my watch, pressing the plastic to watch it glow neon and gaudy in the quivering fields of sunflowers.

They asked to keep it.

“No.” I pulled my hand away. Because I kept time corded around my heartbeat, feared losing myself without it.

Ruslan, grabbing hold of the watch again as he pulled me to a game of soccer out past the sunflowers, asked between breaths when he had me alone, “Home, with you?” He practiced enough English for just these words, stitching them together with fingers that point to him, to me, to the cerulean sky.

“I’m only twenty,” shaking my head, the words oversalted in the borscht air. He didn’t respond, only pressed the buttons on my watch until an alarm sounded.

“I’m only twenty,” pleading this time, between the beeps.

Tolic, who laid his head on the sharp edges of my stomach beneath the patchwork shade of the apple tree, turning my watch over and over, whispered on a slight wind, “Mama.” Relieved at least I was so utterly empty by then – no other stasis of being could have held such a moment without undoing.

And Vanya, aware of the inhale before adolescence, the slight holding of the breath, before the tilt, the pull, the dragging away in the teeth of that rabid dog that came out at night. He feared dying like his parents- one addicted to opioids, the other to vodka. He never touched my watch, only watched it over the shoulder of others, eyes slit, the slight tremor of his hands hidden behind his back.

My heart, a clean split – the first of its kind, perfect jagged lines like the “Best” necklace half I got from my friend when I was ten – the kind that needs only its other “Friends” half to make it whole again.

There is a question I ask over and over- just one I ask a million different ways: What is my love, if it falls on you as a spike? I held the handle of the broom, swept the brittle pieces of little hearts into a neat pile, flew away as the wind picked up, watch pressed to glass.

I was home three days before he first showed up, Rage, the barbs staked into my throat. I began suffocating as he stretched his bulbous body to fit the shape of me.

My mom was the first to notice – the change of breath, the slowing, the wheeze of keeping pace as I trailed her on the stairs. She took me to a doctor who found a growth on my trachea, likely a rampant disease in Eastern Europe called Rhinoscleroma, blocking sixty percent of my airway. Growing.

I was rushed into surgery where the doctor put me to sleep like a princess, removed Ukraine from my throat, and woke me with a clap of his hands. Applause as he bowed over me, girl in a box, sawed in half. Miraculously whole again.

The curtain fell.

Rage, you devious beast. You made me believe I could be rid of you- disguised yourself as something that could be removed with privilege, money, magic. You knew I was close then, too close, to knowing your name. You broke my heart in clean lines, made me believe that’s what hearts do, knowing full well that one break would be the start, on its way to ashes. To dust.

Because now my orphan boys, the ones who asked to come home with me all those years ago, are in their twenties.

I remember them with their sticks, lobbing the heads of sunflowers. They held their fears out to me like secrets in trembling hands, told me the snakes here aren’t poisonous…well…only poisonous if they bite you.

And there again, a sandpaper itching at my throat as I watch Russia slither awake and slip into the quiet edges of Kharkiv, setting up a makeshift war camp in the white brick barracks, a goliath heaving its weight at an underdog, a drunk parent slapping their child away, twisting the wrist with the watch until love is on its knees.

The sunflowers bend weary heads.

I am the Peacemaker.

I reach for the stake at my throat.

I unleash Rage.