79 Dresses Into Hell

79 dresses into hell and I might combust in the satin shroud holding everything I've ever touched together with feeble thread, always on the verge of snapping and fretting.  When I was a girl there was tulle in my heart, like little puffs of artificial hope staggering across a quiet stage gesticulating to an empty audience.  A thousand yards knotted to my waist in a mad rush for glamour and that fine lean cheek of genius.  I saw what really came with the snow out my window and no one asked me to say it out loud.  So I said it to myself with great enthusiasm and the bay tree moved and gathered me into her aromatic leaves and we lived in the quiet cold together with no more words until spring.

79 dresses into hell and I have carved my name into the skin of time that I might not become a watery memory like empty houses after floods.  But I hear you all out there rushing into walls with frothing waves like muscles bunching against brick and bursting open with raw form, bleeding without feeling, without notice, leading into new walls with the same passionate abandon as every time before and I think you are numb with the fight.  I want to be you when you are opened up but still whole, still fierce, still operating full throttle.

79 dresses into hell and I never burnt my tickets lodged in secret pockets, waiting for memory to follow like ants after dust and crumbs between the love and hate.  When I was a girl I pulled the tall frocks up over small bones and I tripped on hems, drowned in peach voile and lady lace and I thought maybe I would never peel away.  Sloughing off a sense of wrong time, wrong place, wrong age.  I was as old as the antique buttons cutting up the back and down the sleeves of peach froth.  And I was a girl then.  Still soft and sweet and dreaming. 

79 dresses into hell and I still had skin like unripe apricots in cream and swanned around with angel's wings and antidotes like a miniature Florence Nightingale of the lost and bitter soul; my breath the band-aid and my blood the silk veil across the fragile bones of the battle-worn.  Gathering up wild comfrey into the folds of my train, held tight to my heart, I was ready to minister to the damned.  I took chipped swords from half dead soldiers and laid them to rest against a better ground.  I removed the limbs from the dying to save their flesh and I sent them into the light where broken butterflies still drift towards the sun.

I don't know when the swords all became my own.  I don't know at what point I held the breath of the dying and made it my own voice, my own call; let it become the wings of my spirit.  I don't know when I first rose from the tulle to wield my own weapon and crack it down against the chest of evil.  I don't know when I stopped being a girl and stood up as a warrior.

It might have been the first time I held my hand out to someone weaker than myself.

It might have happened when I was abjectly crawling chest to the ground, frightened to look up; to see the worst thing a girl can see looking back at her, and suddenly understood that no one was ever going to stand up taller than me and shield my ridiculous tulle train and crown of thistle-down and protect this lucid thin skin of mine.

79 dresses into hell and I rose to my full height and drew my sword up into the weather where everyone might see the blade, thin and deadly against stars too pale to cry, and turned it against the encroaching dark.