Letter I Wanted To Write To My Homebuyer

I chose you for your love of bungalows and bougainvillea,

your days curing cancer in a lab.

I too was young and conscientious when I bought this house,

a budding science journalist, 

sure to find my beloved. 

This home can hold your dreams,

the realized and the shattered.

There will be both.

My life collapsed into these four walls after a trauma,

an assault, abroad.

I couldn’t sleep, walk or work.

Years passed by my window on the dark side of the alley.

I lost the job I loved a few miles away.

Lost my grandmother, father, uncle and friend.

Lost my fiancée and childbearing years.

It took well more than a decade to finally heal,

if such a thing as finally exists.

If these walls could speak, they might say:

Trust your gut above all else.

Do not permit anyone who makes you scared or small.

Come home alone to settle for a spell each day.

Listen to heartbeat, raven, wind in the trees.

Court the patch of land by the glass chime. It’s yours too.

You could grow a garden with your own two hands.

Pretend it’s a sanctuary where anything is possible inside you:

good will, quietude, the kind of fulfillment

that spills quietly over fields like daffodils.

I wept on the floor more times than I’ll tell you.

I grew into a woman who met life on its messy,

unimaginable terms,

who learned again to walk, first in sorrow,

who learned again to skip, sometimes into joy,

who under these eves learned again to feel.

In the backyard, I left you flowerpots for growing,

a ladder to climb.

—Rebecca Tolin