For any perceived injustice done to my life, there are countless worse visited to countless more.  The world is a trial for some, a rough and deadly way to no good end. It can always be worse, but for some it could not possibly be.

If I were to tell you what she'd been through, list it out like a grocery list?  Write it out longhand in the nearest notebook?  It would shock and seethe, you would be lost for air, wanting an exit. Her mundane "bad day" makes my mundane bad day look like a day in a park, a day spent at rest in fields.  She's had the very worst of it distilled to a point and driven through her from childhood.

Some people live as examples of their kindness or tolerance or ability to forgive in the face of inhuman struggle.  Some people seem to serve as markers for the sorts of reserve strength that humans are capable of.  And some just light the way with their fire, pointlessly dying in the course of suffering so dire that no human language can contain the description; it breaks into howls and grinding.  She rests firmly in that company, caught between her mundane life and the course it offers, the paths and trespasses clearly marked. Scar tissue in and out, a constant nerve on bone pain.  She wakes with it, breathes with it, eats with it, talks to it, writes around it. Physical, emotional, turmoil.

She wakes with nerve pain blinding her, does what she has to. Makes breakfast. Puts the kids to school.

Works through the day finding phrase from muses too dim and distant. Grinds her teeth with agony when the pain is too distinct.

Goes to bed at night with echoes, spirits.

She exists as a mother, a wife, a friend. She can still be labeled daughter, but not without a certain warfare happening behind her eyes. She wears combat boots in there, marches in strict lossless time to her inner turmoil.  Wakes with fire behind every nerve, and starts it up again but the whole time there's a pinpoint of pain sharper than any other, every day bright and backward, evil.  She faces that, no matter what. Every action lit by it.

One day back there, one day she must have just decided: fuck this.  This is too much and too little, and it courses through veins sickened by so much poison.  And it is threatening the very core of what I am, it is breaking me into smaller and smaller pieces and one day I may not be able to identify my ashes in this hurricane.

And she found something else, something more than human, some thing that allowed her to stay calm. To steady her hands, to make the world spin under it's own power and not under the weight of her trouble.  And slowly piece by piece, she dropped the danger and blood and turmoil and picked up on some universal thing, some untold truth that exists somewhere buried in the most traumatic heart of all of us.

And she won't call it God, and neither will I.

She won't ascribe magic to what can be explained. No arrogance, no hatred, everything she has been victim of her entire life becomes braille on armor that she sets aside for future reference but lives now without the weight. She has found some core thing that gives mothers strength to lift busses from their children's bodies. She has found fuel and fire from her past and pain and no amount of hyperbolic hysteria can properly put the words on the page that mean what she is now.

Her motherhood means, some part of her is passing into the world and science insists that the best of it will be handed off to her daughter and the universe? The universe may be saved by this.