Re collection

A Story of Lilith

To recollect is to collect again every part of yourself you had scattered to the wind in that first burst of pain and every other pain that cascaded like a drum to pound and pound your bone until it fractured into shards.

To recollect is to gather again those shards and sew like kintsugi with melted gold thread a kind of life, a kind life, a kindred.

And your kindred is full of bristles, hazy stuffed couches, jazz brass, too weak coffee, and wobbly knees. It’s full of wishbones and broken crib slats, dark locked doors, and a swing creaking alone, butt-of-joke laughs, prickly grass, and shards of real glass.

Lilith was an eternal who loved a mortal.
Lilith was eternity who loved mortality.

And this polarity created such an electric shock to the universe’s system, not ready for the divine to inhabit the human yet, that it created a black hole and sucked Lilith to another realm where she came back to earth as a snake.

By the time she returned, Adam had moved on and manifested a new lover, one that wouldn’t upset the system quite so much. One made out of himself, for himself, one lacking most of the autonomy and agency Lilith had. Maybe less exciting, but more manageable and certainly more tamable and by design more subservient because she was made out of a part of Adam. She owed her existence to him.

Whether from jealousy (unlikely) or compassion (likely), Lilith saw Eve in a way Eve could not see herself. She saw Eve’s reality on a timeline Eve couldn’t conceive, because Lilith knew what existed, what was possible: the vast breadth and depth the universe could offer Eve’s life if she could just unblind herself from her boundedness and unbind into real safety: the kind she makes with her own two hands.

So Lilith told Eve the truth.
And the truth sounded like temptation.
And the truth was so subversive, it overturned the status quo.
And the truth made Power angry, so power punished the truth teller and the truth receiver equally.

But it didn’t stop truth from existing.

You can still see her every time a woman walks out her front door for the last time or picks up the phone to call an advocate. Every time she makes an appointment to get contraception or says no when Power wants her to say yes.