Invisible

There is a leaf on my kitchen floor, no doubt drug in by someone’s shoes. It’s lying in the path that my husband treks daily, and yet it’s been there for three days. I eye this little leaf as I work on the computer, fix dinner, haul bags to and from the car, but I do not pick it up. Maybe I should. For leaving it there is a constant reminder to my blood pressure of all that it represents.

I am that little leaf. There, but unnoticed. Broken, but not picked up and tenderly cared for. Cursed, but not thrown away. Just there. Waiting.

My little girl noticed the leaf one day, proclaimed it yucky, but walked away. Funny how life is like that. When someone has hurt us, it is rarely that person who will notice, but someone else entirely. And even if it’s somewhat of a relief to be reassured that we are not invisible, it doesn’t fix the hurt. We are still broken, waiting for the one who hurt us, to realize it, to pick us up with tenderness and fix it, or at the very least, to cut the ropes that bind us, so that we can be free - of the waiting.

I don’t know at what point I fell from the tree. I used to be green and nourished and alive. But little by little, death came. Perhaps figuratively, or maybe it began with the literal, when my husband and I first realized that life would not be a perfect bubble of perpetual Spring.

Loved ones would die. Unfortunately, too many in too short a time. We’d be stricken with illness, watch helplessly as friends and loved ones endured trials, see the hopes and dreams of a pregnancy end too soon, suffer staggering financial blows, have to make impossible decisions. Age beyond our years.

We used to cling to the same branch, even flourished enough to produce two little offshoots. But somehow, in the turning away from the sun, so that it would instead shine on the tiny buds striving to thrive, I began to shrivel, become weaker. Eventually fall away.

And now I lay helplessly far from the tree, looking up with a longing that they will notice the empty spot beside them.

How I long to be swept up with the wind and replanted. Revitalized. Loved.

But it is that same wind, that same fierceness that assaults us, that has him clinging to the branch, blindly - just trying to survive. He can not hear my voice over the wind, and he can not open his eyes against its force long enough to see how far I’ve fallen.

He is trying with all his might to hold on, to believe that there is more to life than death. But I already feel the dryness in my bones.

Though his holding on prolongs our appearance of life, of liveliness, there is part of me that wishes he would just let go. At least then, we’d be together again. A broken, huddled mass, parts of us crushed forever to dust, but maybe, just maybe somewhere in that grinding into earth, we could bind together again. Perhaps we would not only notice each other, but fortify each other against the rain, the wind, the sun. And maybe, when there was nothing left but that very foundation we started with, we could become strong again, intertwine the roots that had grown apart, and begin to rise up anew.

But for now, I’m waiting. Just like the little leaf on my kitchen floor. I may be being stubborn, but I refuse to pick it up. It may be crushed or caressed, but at least it will be seen.