A Bad Sunday Poem

When I was thinner and had smooth skin and believed in magic I used to bring a tumbled, translucent pink mineral with me in my backpack. I carried it because the person I trusted most at the time had smiled deeply at me, skin wrinkled around her eyes as she explained “rose quartz promotes healing and opens the self to love.” You can imagine that a wounded high schooler carried it everywhere with her, and I did. The rose quartz seemed the softest thing in my life, when I was all bony fingers and pungent perfume and steel toed leather boots and sharp glances.

Before I knew that a crystal and a mineral are not the same thing, I imagined that love would feel the way my blushed charm felt– smooth and cool and comforting. I figured they would be alike in that despite my flaws and terrible memory that once I obtained them they would be impossible to lose simply because I believed in their power. I lost my belief in the stone when I learned the difference between crystals and minerals, but for some reason I believed that love could still be a composition. Real love could be a rock, like God who is a rock and who is also Love, according to a Psalm I read in basic training, before the shifts changed and it was my turn to clean the latrine. I pushed my crumbling, hopeful naivety to entertain the idea of unmoving permanence, of a life that did not shake when a breeze whispered past it.

When I’d had my fill of cleaning latrines and guns and considered believing in magic again, I got married. I thought that perhaps love was sand, ground up bits of rocks that I had to deal with if I wanted the naturally formed and specific chemical bond. I didn’t know that by putting it that way I built our castle to be washed away by the next tide, and that nothing can stop the attraction of the moon and the sun that makes the tide. In making metaphors around minerals I forgot to define myself as a person, and when I washed to shore again I stood quivering in a string of questions and depression not unlike driving lost in a palpable fog.

How could I define myself outside of these things? A reasonable second-self ate away at me in the form of doubt as I picked up the old habit of moving from house to house. Too much time lingering on what ought and could hadn’t made it easier for me, but had frozen me perfectly in place with only my mind pointlessly pivoting amongst things I would not understand until I experienced them. The other day I picked up that mineral again –let’s call it a stone, for practical purposes– and felt it for the first time without belief. It is still a small, light, pink, smooth thing. It is still pleasant to look at. I will not fail to appreciate it by wanting it to be like love. I can only hope I do not miss love in any of it’s compositions by searching for something else.