A Silly Idea

People

Have tried to pretend that trauma

Is a neat little thing

That goes in a straight line

And has a beginning, middle, and end.

They pretend it is finite,

Then finished,

And gone.

People think trauma is clean,

And singular,

A minor inconvenience,

Like walking through cobwebs.

Just a minor nuisance,

Then you brush it away.

We try to brush it away,

Something that grows like fungi,

With roots and networks,

Something that slips through cracks

And burrows under floors,

Something that seeps into the walls

And lives and rots,

Then quietly grows and spreads,

Until it bursts to the surface

Blossoming into strange shapes and textures,

An ugly blight with no beginning, and no end,

Just a conglomerate of millions of tiny cells,

Whose seeds are not destroyed by the wind, but dispersed,

Spreading across worlds and universes,

Something entirely human yet completely alien.

Older than your first dreams, younger than your last nightmares.

And yet,

You keep brushing it away, swatting your hand back and forth,

Pretending that that simple gesture

Is enough to bring down a mountain,

To erase an entire network of deeply tangled roots and twisted lines,

To dismiss something as complex as the entire human legacy.

What a silly idea.