fragment

At home she bent to tie her shoe and cried, still and captured, hands on the laces. The last of the lies had fallen in the walk from her car to the front door, and the weightlessness was tender and terrifying. An innocence she had given up ever knowing had filled her cells, a vulnerability she had relinquished for control, a joyous chaos of embrace she had turned away in place of static independence. Now she could feel her connection to her family, her husband, the willow trees against her childhood home, the mountaintops in the far eastern view, the cats and fleas and barnacles and grass and salt waters, now she could feel the connectivity of being utterly the same as everything else, alive and utterly helpless before fate, shockingly vulnerable and hungry and filled with strange and morphing desires and emotions, lit up like the night sky with neurons firing, terribly beautiful or filled with negative space, an enigma, an equation, a dream, a newborn's cry, a dying breath, a million tides and touches, outer space and the smallest molecule, a vibrating frequency, a warm kiss on the mouth, a hand letting go. She had walked away from it all because she had wanted to be a tangible definition with game board rules. And now, she had let those old desires be cleaved; a definition unchanging and immobile is already dead and replaced with the new defined thing, and she was tired of being replaced.