When I say ex-husband
apples fall out of my apron.
I have been carrying them up
running for the hills 
and I hadn't realized

in the sticky heat and the 
nippy high reeds and its hoppers, 
the grass sting, 
the sweat off my forehead to the 
dimple in my wrist,
I just overlooked it.

Those beautiful apples.
Candy.
Tin can brandy and a knife
I’d sit and eat them,
but the fire.

Still, those apples.
I knew exactly how to hold them long enough to get home,
but in this heat,
with a bad knee,
in this world,
dropping those apples
was enough weight off to make it out.

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I have this recurring dream.

It is Vespers in Carolina. The forest is not quiet, but no one is speaking. The sound of hundreds of girls walking around in white is something you can’t escape. Green tendrils are past their shoulders. Some wear Sunday school clothes, others wear white linen pants, and some are in nightgowns. The dresses caught in the ferns look like doves. Carolina is so green it envelops you.

Underneath, the girls carry white candles, holding both a Bible verse and a prayer to Persephone. This was not considered heretical in so many old Episcopalian services.

I am again an ageless little girl in a moment of unbroken peace. I didn’t make it out of my teenage years with a belief in the Christian God, but when I was eight, someone asked me what God looked like, and I said, “Vespers.”

This is a memory.

Touched, I Am Holy

The first time I ever remember being slut-shamed was around twelve. During Vespers, instead of walking up the hill with our candles, Hope and I took them into our empty cabin.

I remember innocence as a girl with scissors in a cedar closet, cutting my bangs. The silver in my own hands catching as I cut her flax curls and revealed her charcoal eyes. I couldn’t help but kiss her—risking it for the first time. She kissed back, there with two candles as witness. And that was all there was. We snuck back to Vespers feeling silly and new.

It is always me who kisses first, and I rightfully took the blame. Obviously, they noticed our hair and asked questions. A counselor got onto me. My mother was called. Though I knew I was supposed to feel shame, I felt holy. Once I had seen the blue at Vespers, it was very hard to convince me of what God was not.

Eventually, the shame did find me. Quickly, I learned how to hide.

As a child, I remember thinking in wonder that they must not know—that only some of us know we don’t have to follow the rules of heteronormativity. I am the granddaughter of an infamous sixth-grade English teacher. I had read Tolkien and Rowling and Lewis enough to know that it is quite normal for some people to be blind to what is right in front of them. There are plenty of situations where some people can see the magic and others are afraid.

Everything Here Is You

In my dream, I am every moment of myself in white—a color that, for me, means death and resurrection.

Holding my candles for Persephone, I march myself up the hill. Wind pushing me through other exiled memories, I make it to the chapel at the top. We drop our lights off the top of the cliff, and they float away slowly and gently as the Carolina haze contrasts them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón says the author is every character in their books (The Shadow of the Wind). Like in a dream, everything here is you.

Love ungiven is rerouted—never created or destroyed—and so I can forgive the world for demonizing what they don’t understand.

It is enough to be this beautiful.

The blue interrupting the ferns;
The girls in pants and skirts.
The Bible verse and the prayer to Persephone;
The innocence and the blame.

It is no wonder people cannot hold me with all my paradoxes.
But I can see the magic, and I am not afraid.