That is the whole of it, some mornings.
Not a small thing dressed up as a small thing. The actual enormity of it stated plainly because plainly is how enormous things sometimes need to be stated, without the ornamentation, without the architecture of metaphor and craft around it, just the fact itself standing in the morning light: still here. This body, this life, this woman, after everything, after the years that tried to diminish her and sometimes succeeded and sometimes did not, still here, still in the morning, still looking out the window at the whatever-is-there-today, the October trees or the May green or the November honest grey, still looking, still seeing it, still capable of finding it worth seeing.
I did not always expect to feel this way.
There were years when still here felt like a consolation prize rather than a gift. Years when the stillness of here was the stillness of exhaustion, of someone who has stopped not because she chose to stop but because there was nothing left to run on. I was here in those years too. I was here and depleted and not sure what here was offering me that would be worth the cost of continuing to be in it.
I know now what here was offering me.
It was offering me this. This morning. This body that has opinions about stairs and wakes at three and has been through the fire and is still, improbably, basically fine. This life that has a garden in it now, and a ceramics class, and a mother whose lamp is on my bedside table, and children who call from new cities with their new lives, and a marriage that found its way back to itself, and three friends who pick up in two rings, and a walk every morning in all weathers, and the writing that was always mine and is finally, fully mine.
Still here.
Not as what remains after the losses. Not as what survived despite everything. As what is, right now, on this morning, in this light, in this one life that is mine and that I am finally, at this age, in this season, fully in.
Still here. Still beginning. Still glad.
