Reprinted from Instagram.
You can see her from the street. Her gap-toothed grin beaming down from above. A beacon of light. Of hope. Blues and reds and blacks that are impossibly warm. That reach out and hug you. Pulling you in to a housecoat that smells faintly of perfume and mango and something baking in another room. It is goodness. She is goodness. It is hard to let go.
It started as a temporary morgue on my street in Manhattan and ended here in Savannah. In a house built in 1910 that survived two fires and countless storms and fallen trees and the withering of a neighborhood to the ugliest and most unimaginable of things. Yet here it is. Here we are. Two trains on the same track from opposite ends of the universe. Each needing the other to heal and move forward.
None of it makes much sense. Seventeen months of blur. Of emptying out your pockets and turning your soul upside down and examining every nook and cranny for answers and meaning. As hard to look inward as outward. Everything you knew covered in a blanket of dust. Undisturbed, from another time.
I stare at the woman from the steps of the front porch. This is home now. Surrounded by what used to be and walking toward what is to come. Her soft eyes and wide smile light up the darkened hallway. I turn the lock on the door. Something is baking in another room.