there is a woman that i know from my workplace that i adore.
she is lovely, kind and creative fist and schizophrenic second... even in her delusions she is sweet and intuitive and careful and full of some kind of understanding that you don't find in many people. She knits and sews and makes jewelry..
she believes she is part pterodactyl with long horn teeth. she is part human and part rat with gills. she took a lie detector test and found out she is 67 years old. she hides on land that is off the grid to keep her safe until she can catch the snake that has been tormenting her. she does hard work feeding large animals to larger animals....
the first time i met her i had just moved home from somewhere far away... i was happy to be home but longing for everything i had left too... it was my second day back when she came in to my shop. she looked me in the eye and said " do you ever grow bigger than your space? have you ever been driven out by how big you have become? sometimes you need to go where you can get your next set of teeth. that's how you know you are growing. and we are growing...you are growing"
she went on to explain how fucking hard and painful and weird it is to grow out of the space you have grown accustom to being in. she explained how even if it is super shitty and it leaves you outside 90% of the time you have to do it. i think about it all the time. i had to do it too... her version of this is so much different than mine... hard and scary in different ways...
i later found out from her family that around the time she said this to me ..she had left the shelter she was living in...and went back to the streets...
in days and weeks after that conversation she would come in and tell me how things were hard... but she was making it through... she told me she was just moving on to the next step... she also went through a break up and told me how she went from the warmth of being on the inside of knowing someone to the coldest rattle in her chest... she had so many things going on in her world ...but she always had this sense of understanding that it wouldn't stay that way forever....
to be continued......
