How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Meghan Calhoun Johnston
You are right to say that I seem different,
And yet your prognosis, drawn from
cocked head, narrowed eye, circled observance
will fail to mark the change.
The girl that you left looks the same,
But a woman sings a wiser song within.
Listen. Listen, and you will hear her.
"I have laughed," she sings, "at things you would not understand
And understood the whimsical laughter that preserves sanity.
I have sobbed bitterly, and you have not been there to catch my tears,
And I have fallen, and stood, and dried my own eyes.
I have felt, among the most intense of communities,
As utterly alone as I have ever been,
and in moments of utter solitude I have found
Spirit in the very grass and air and water which surround and share my isolation.
I have loved people who are strangers to you
with the absolute fullness of the being that you have known in me always.
I have talked of God to others who formed God from my words,
I have doubted every word past my lips—
and learned to entertain Belief even with Doubt a permanent houseguest.
I have been haunted by the terrified keening of a child
whose life I saved or doomed by my words.
And I have felt the full weight of my responsibility, tested it with my strength
and put on the harness of necessity.
I have been kissed by a man who rushes in where you fear to tread
And who loves me unreservedly at seven in the morning
when I am searching through my purse, wild hair and strained face, for a credit card.
I have kissed without loving, loved without kissing,
yet have exchanged with a kiss emotion real, tangible, and trusting.
I have slimmed; I have grown; I have glimpsed the pain and love and learning
That wait to fashion me adult
And I have become a Woman-Work in progress."
And so I do not blame you for thinking me changed,
for as I say "I love you" I know more of what I am saying
and mean more, and despair less.
For I have found God in the loss and gain which may await those words,
And I have found the Self who laughs to endure it all.
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