He was born in a house where breaking was a language, a language of glass shards on the floor, his mother’s voice a wire drawn tight, his father’s anger a storm passing door to door with a fist behind it. He learned at an early age to listen for the signs of danger: a cabinet slamming shut, silence taking on a metallic sheen, the dog slipping beneath the table. Other boys outside came from a different kind of light: lunchboxes full, shoes that fit, futures spoken over them like a benediction, as if desire alone would do it. He came from a different place: hunger, walls sweating through winter, the long math of not enough. It followed him like a second skin, and so he developed a sense of hardness first in the jaw, then the hand, then the body’s quick passion for anything that would numb it: smoke, powder, the temporary black solace of not feeling the house burning within him.
But for a time, he carried it with him like a loaded thing. Then, not all at once, not cleanly, something in him rebelled. A hand closing around a pencil. Charcoal under the nail. Paint that opened like a wound, then like a window. The plain wonder of making. He leaned toward art the way some men lean toward prayer. Desperate at first, then faithful. And when he put the bottle down, when he walked out of that old chemical darkness, the leaving was its own part. Some voices fell off behind him. Some blood ran stranger. Not everybody forgives the man who survives otherwise. Still, he walked on.
And now he sits among the lavender, purple growing in rows like a peace he would not have believed until now. The wind stirs through the stalks with the soft hushing of a good mother. The whole earth seems to breathe through scent. His hands are his hands. The past is not gone. It sleeps in the wood of him, in the sudden flinches, in the old bracing. But here, the stalks bend and do not snap. Here, the air seems to say what no house ever said to him: Stay. Stay soft if you can. Stay. And the boy who was raised on splinters sits among the lavender at last unlearning the language of destruction. Until the silence itself is scented with healing.
-M. Rowan Nowak