Shook

An Excerpt from My Upcoming Book, Materia Medica: Memoirs of a Wounded Healer

I shook as if I was swimming in the bayou when lightning struck. “It’s over,” he said. These were the first words he’d spoken to me in days. Sounds of cars going over the freeway overpass soared above our heads. I sat on the bumper of my van, eyes lost in the graffiti painted levee, searching for relief from the violent storm that brewed inside of my ribcage, right where my heart was supposed to be.

“Just like that?” I asked. “Fuck.” I had nowhere to go. This breakup meant that I was living in my van, again. I turned to him, expecting him to at least look me in the face. Instead, he nodded, keeping his eyes to the ground.

I suppose it wasn’t easy for him, navigating the roaring white waters of mania, tossing aside his life jacket hoping it’d help him swim to shore. Of course, I couldn’t see this at the time. All I saw was my life shapeshifting before my eyes. Just like that, the closest thing I had that resembled belonging somewhere evaporated into the humid Louisiana sky. Hanging low in the clouds, just above my head; out of reach, only there for me to see.

I carried my injured ego over the St. Claude Bridge, all the way to our century old shotgun house that sat across from an abandoned grade school. It had been empty since Hurricane Katrina tore through its brick and glass twelve years prior. We had rented two rooms of the four-bedroom house for one hundred dollars a room. He and I shared one room, and he rented the other for his mother who had recently gotten out of prison. When his daughters visited, we all lived communally. That particular evening, I was grateful to arrive at an empty house.

I wept as I packed my belongings into my Chevy Astro cargo-van. I threw what I would leave behind all over his bed creating a disaster mess for him to pick up later. A petty revenge that made me feel good in the moment. Every trip to the van I took, I scoffed at the amount of room taken up by the bed-loft extension. I had built it the previous summer so that he could live in my van with me when we got evicted. It didn’t take long for the inevitable gentrification to move in once they saw how beautiful the sun was when it hit this side of the levee.

The thought of the unbearable deep southern heat penetrating the hot metal belly of my van crossed my mind. I decided right then that I wouldn’t do that again and that I wouldn’t stay in New Orleans. I left behind what I couldn’t fit in the van and headed to say goodbye to the only family that I had for thousands of miles.

The smell of sweat and pollen wafting off the Mississippi River filled my nostrils. The mother of my now ex’s children sat on the porch with me as we watched the kids play in the yard. “Here,” she said, handing me a book. “I think you should read this.” The cover was Texas-sky blue with bursts of marigold yellows. The book’s vibrance was a stark contrast against the cracked and crumbling street. It was titled Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health by Rosemary Gladstar; my first Materia medica.

When I was a child, I lived by a bluff where there once was an old city dump. Gravel had filled the vast vacated lot long before I was born and by the time I was venturing on its grounds, wild fennel and dill grew tall above my head along with blackberries and maple trees. The occasional cool piece of junk would surface from the land’s human-made scar, sometimes a treasure but most of the time not. I grew up on this nature playground, raised by the terrain in a way. It was an escape for me and my journal, and nobody else.

Rosemary Gladstar delivers incredible medicinal recipes along with a Materia medica for the most important herbs in her own herbalism practice. The foundational knowledge that Gladstar gives the reader is the very same foundation that my own earth medicine practice is made of today. It was like home was calling me and Rosemary Gladstar was the messenger.

“Thank you,” I said.

I stayed at their house for as long as we could bear the sadness. When it was time to go, I sat down with each of the three, explained that I was leaving, that I would stay in touch, and said my goodbyes. Then I left New Orleans, for good this time.