Processing

Transmutation was not a word I was familiar with but I had unknowingly learned something about the process of it. I'd learned that you could transform despair into anger by applying fire. And that one of the properties of anger is propulsion which will rocket you right out of that terminally stuck feeling that comes with despair. Locked in a tiny, freshly painted room of the bleakest white. 

It took me a long time to realize some of anger's other properties. Like that it's a corrosive that gradually dissolves its host and taints everything external it comes into contact with. And like that it's addictive. When you get deep enough into it, you start to think that it's who you are and it becomes your default operating system. Without it, are you anything at all? The chemical quickening of it. The gritted teeth of resolve. It works, in a way, for a while. That is until all your molars crack right down through to the tip of the root.

On the table, while she was drumming and singing and talking to me about the various phases of my life, I could see myself clearly and from a different perspective in each stage. Underneath the anger, the despair, the pain, the loss - there was love. "It's not sadness. It's love," someone said. Hot tears of understanding came.