A Bear Shaped Cloud

Asking for Everything

A stream of consciousness on trauma and healing.

I wish you whole. 💙

-V

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I rarely ask people for anything, I don’t know how. Yet I contain caverns of love to give, I feel it living inside of me. I reach my hand down into it, I dip my fingers in and I pull out rage. Where is the love? I ask myself and have no answer.

But I can feel it in there, the love…you know it hasn’t gone, it’s just all mixed together, all the grief, the love, the rage, the tears. I can’t speak sometimes because the tears just come, they come unabated. Don’t pity me though because there is a fire burning inside each teardrop. A fire that has burned down houses, that has left blackened cars gutted on the side of the road, milepost after milepost, monuments to rage, to love, to grief too. It’s all the same.

There’s a little girl on that road, she seems innocent until she takes a hacksaw to my jaw, she says speeches are overrated, she says to stop talking and start walking. She tells me poetry is dumb. She says it’s no fun being a needy, ugly little thing. She tells me to flex, she wants to see how strong I am. My muscles don’t convince her. She takes the hacksaw to my chest too and cuts out my heart. “You won’t be needing this” she says.

Oh, I keep meaning to ask her name, but then I remember she told me once. I was in the New Mexico desert and she came to visit. She was a three legged dog. I asked where the leg had gone and she looked at the sky. “Things just happen, you don’t realize until it’s too late.”

“What should I call you?” I asked her.

“Captain Nemo!” She laughed and scampered away on three legs.

I didn't believe that was her name, but I knew who she was and I knew she could be dog, or girl or bear or she could be a cloud shaped like a bear.

Another time I slept badly and I woke up with a sharp pain in my ribs. I knew she had broken free in the night. She had been occupying the space where my heart had once been, but now, she was off! Was it in a submarine or had she grown wings? There's no such thing as a bad bed, only those who sleep badly. I blamed myself for losing her, for not remembering her name, for stumbling through life on three legs.

I find her again though, this time in a bar. She looks really good. Her lips are shiny, red and full. Her jeans are tight and hug her curves. Someone has recently told her that she is at the perfect age for bearing children.

She sees me and laughs, then takes a long slow drag from her cigarette, the filter end is left with the juicy imprint of her red lips. She pours me a whiskey, leans in close to me and whispers: “You know, men despise complicated women.” Then she grabs a long spoon from behind the bar and uses it to scoop out some of my brain. She replaces the space between my ears with a piece of chocolate cake. A big fat piece of chocolate cake.

“Men want cake.” She says resolutely.

I finish the whiskey and feel as dull as a butter knife. In the smoky bar I shoot pool badly on purpose. I giggle, I wiggle my hips. The Captain looks on, but she's a bear now and she mouths one word across the bar.

“Liar”

This time I’m the one laughing. Fuck you. I'm cake! But later, in the bathroom, half drunk I stare into my own eyes in the dirty mirror. My eyes are full of flames and my hands are awkward bear paws with giant claws that can't tear the toilet paper.

I try never to ask for anything. I am the wife that bakes the cakes. Remember every birthday? No I'm bad at that, the important dates elude me, the years slide together, a blur. There is a ball of yarn and some other crafting supplies in my chest. She has been gone a long time I realize.

I bake cakes for no occasion because I can't remember when the cakes are supposed to happen but we must have cake nonetheless. Then suddenly I am the bear that trashes the kitchen and rips the door off the refrigerator, but it's an accident! I don't know how to use these bear paws yet.

The little girl is in the kitchen too and she's melting down old candles to make new candles. The old shapes just became blobs of nothing, time to make the blobs into something new. What this time? The flame on the stove leaps higher, the wax is too hot and ignites. The little girl grabs the flaming pan of wax and runs for the back door.

“I know! I'll throw it in the snow” she hollers to the bear but then she trips and even as she holds the pan tightly the hot wax flies across the room and sticks to the back door and every other surface it touches. The new shape is not what she expected.

The cake, just barely in the oven, collapses from the commotion and is also now the wrong shape.

Sometimes, the crafting supplies come in handy. When my eyes are not flames and my hands are not bear paws, when my heart comes home and I can temporarily sew up the hole in my chest. When the girl with the wings and dry tears on her face comes to rest beside me.

Then I am good sleeping. I am the big and the little spoon. The perfectly risen cake is on the kitchen counter and it knows when the birthday is so I don't worry. The blankets are not too tight or too heavy and the dog is laying next to my feet with her 3 legs and all the pieces of her decommissioned submarine are tucked under the bed.

Oh Captain, this is the good way, this is the way. She knows how to steer us and I am not afraid of what may burn down. She's not one who burns things.

But what about those charred black cars! The empty husks of the houses we've burned. I think of some ravens I saw once and how they voraciously pecked away at a roadkill jackrabbit. They remind me of all the modes of transportation I’ve tried and then abandoned, of all the lives I've lived within my life, playing dress up. I think of the wrong turns, the lying to myself about how to get where I needed to go and all that time with my bones and sinew exposed, that hole in my chest. Protection was never protective. I was just a cloud in the shape of a bear.

Is love a lie? No! Never a lie, but all so twisted. She twisted it. No, I did. Mistakes cry out for more mistakes but we don’t call them that anymore. It was just my best. It was the best we could do. Love has always been here.

Captain Nemo always knew that down in the deep water nothing could be corrupt and that it's up on the surface where all the lies happen, so you have to go deep. You have to dive all the way down and overturn the heavy stones of grief and rage that were long ago sunk to the bottom of the sea.

The shape shifting little girl with the hacksaw came to save me, in some way that was not saving at all, but only how she understood it. She came to kill the nightmares. She once said that speeches were overrated, she said my muscles were too weak but I finally flexed them, hard. I held her long enough and tight enough that finally the weapon fell from her tiny clenched fist.

And here in this deep water, nothing can catch fire.

I am asking now!!! I shout it to no one. I am asking for everything! I'm demanding it even. Sometimes the answers feel as though they might kill me, but in the asking I am free.

I am a sweet dreams baby now. I am an innocent bear on a bed of pine needles, vanilla scented sap in my fur. The sweetness of this life is somehow sweeter than ever. I'm a deep diver moving stones across the ocean floor, it's hard! Sometimes I am full of rage and sadness, but my heart is alive.. and it beats a good, steady rhythm in my chest. The gaping hole is being mended again, stitched over and over. The burned out cars and empty houses of old terrors are now just piles of ash, and I welcome the lost girl home.

There is much life to live now, I tell her, and no time to worry over how long it took to get here.

walking the long road home

This is original writing by me, Valkyrie J. Liles, there may be typos and other unhinged shit. We can hope. I don't use AI and I never will. My brain is good enough. Yours is too.