I built a house over my mother’s grave on a foundation of tears. A tiny place of rough-hewn wood that would drive splinters into your fingers with its bitterness. It sat atop a concrete tomb, a love heart tattooed in one corner over her forehead holding the name of my lover. I hoped it might help her understand in death what she never could in life.

She died on our anniversary so I would always remember. But it was not until my dog spoke with her ghost that I knew she really was gone. Why carry around someone else’s pain when you can lie down and offer it up to a stranger?

Absolution is evolution.

When the world closed in and we all became masked strangers afraid of touching, locked in on our own, my lover and I returned to that shed, the love heart forgotten beneath fifteen years of junk. I emptied it with my mind, sorting through the detritus of my life like a stranger.

My brother’s child is a women loving woman too. She also inherited the bruises of my mother’s spite, passed down via my brother who didn’t think there might be another way. She and her lover came over and we stood before the small timber shrine to my mother and decided to turn it into something better, along with ourselves.

My lover salvaged other people’s losses which we turned, with love, into visions of our own making to reshape that tiny house. Cathartic labour stripped the beast of its skin and gave it a window to let the light shine into our souls. I had no idea the view could be so beautiful. We rebuilt ourselves with an interior of fine smoothed timber, wrapped up in warmth and shined down upon by a copper sky that held us more gently.

On the coldest days, we sacrificed the discarded dregs of our histories in a cauldron of fire and howled at the passing clouds. We emerged from the quiet time like chrysalis turning to butterflies, no longer afraid to expose our colourful wings.

Now when I enter that tiny room infused with the scent of eucalyptus and the women who embrace me, I will bask in the soft coppery glow, open my heart to the universe, and sing.