A Way Back | DANA LOTITO-JONES

A Way Back

DANA LOTITO-JONES | VERMONT The gentle punch of blackberry-scented sunscreen hits first, thrust around me like a hug I’ve craved, though I’ve never smelled it before. The hips of these mountains are new, their curves, lovely and grand, pillars for this cathedral sky. This lake a baptismal font for a failing faith. A rebirth of an old life, one I crumpled and mashed into glue, spackling the cracks within me. Little balls of light dance a jig on the water, performing just so my heart will catch their magic and glide on the thread back to the place I’ve clung to where once I laid on a dock and let the water lick the sides and lull me to sleep under a sunset. Do you know what it’s like to be healed? When you rebuild your heart, stitch it back together, swaddled and tender? When you listen to its cries and give it lake water purling around your ankles, a girl eating a hot dog, goggles her crown, enthusiasm spilling from her mouth like candy, rest with a book? Like bathing in a soothing balm. I cry. I have given myself a homecoming on new soil. The ladybug scales the mountainside of my backpack. And stays with me on the ride home. Wings separate—shape: a heart.