The story of all that they’ve survived is alive in the land that's been lost. There is no separation between that place and their pain. Even, and especially, in their silence. The refusal to name it is the evidence of what has endured.
Let that land that’s been lost speak in its own language. Ask them what died and what thrived in the place where they started. How they brought it to their lips and into their hips even as their hearts broke. What tides turned there? What winds whipped and wizened them beyond belief? What muscles flexed in their legs and their guts in the face of whatever that weather was?
Ask them to tell the stories of the plants that were pulled up by their roots and brought into the soup and seeped their sweetness that sustained. Then, grow something together, here and now, from what the earth gives you both in this place you’ve reached. Plunge your hands into the dirt beside them and tunnel together, all the way down to the wound and the wonder of that other world that once was.
Remember, my dear, that we are all surviving something. The wound is already well open. It lives in the way your family talks and in the way that they walk and in whatever they keep from you. Let them keep it. They deserve this.
And keep your eyes on how they clutch what they love. The way that they hold it close is the truest story of their survival. To have loved through struggle. To have loved through loss. To have loved upright without a sound and with no one but the soil, all around.
You are that love. You are their deepest story and their open wound and all the want that remains in that wide open. Your presence is required. Your survival is inevitable.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
