Frozen Woman

The ice was so thick. It stood between them like a quadruple-paned window, not letting an iota of sound in or out. She felt frozen, stuck in time. She wasn't the ice queen of Hans Christien Andersen's stories, the one that steals Kai and magically freezes his heart. No, her heart was hot, beating, she could feel it. But when she looked for it in her chest, she was amazed that actually, where it seemed to beat and throb was in the feeling in her lower abdomen and in between her legs. There, life throbbed, yearned and lot her know that she was, indeed, alive. If it wasn't for that one feeling of deep yearning and heat, her life might have stopped altogether, frozen in time. And she might have become Frozen Woman.

Now, some emotional and temporal distance between the present and the time she felt frozen seemed like a safe space to write about it. To write about Her. To write about Frozen Woman.

It's a hot summer day. It's hard to think that anything might be frozen for too long. But she was. For eight years. Frozen.

She felt like life was happening around her. Like she was just recycling old feelings, old emotions, old beliefs, old memories. That there was nothing left in life to get to know, nothing to discover, nothing to experience that wasn't already somewhere in the realm of the experiencED. She felt so heavy with it. You might think that, since she was frozen, she would float to the surface of her life like frozen water, which, as ice, it does. In fact we owe life to this one simple principle, ice floating. Because if ice didn't float, it would sink. And if it sank, the bottoms of lakes, rivers and even the ocean would freeze, leaving no nutrients available to decompose and create nourishment for life.

Despite the fact that she was ice and should have floated, she felt that she was sinking. Deeper and deeper into an ocean of disconnection and fear.

She must not have sank, thought. She must have floated, because, somehow, little by little, as life does, the current stirred and brought her around and around again to spring. To thaw, to saw new seeds. To welcome the birds flying home from their long flight away in the South. She must have somehow miraculously floated to the right place within herself where she could begin to melt. She floated on home.