Ella 8: they call me Phoenix

She began to position herself to try to stand up, slowly. She began to feel a pain that most people feel quickly, slowly. She began to scream and yell for all the right reasons, slowly. She began to rise.

She tried to walk but it hurt. She pushed her thoughts back and began to focus on the baby steps that would get her back inside the house with the perfect white picket fence. One the way home, she slipped into something or someone else altogether. Slowly, she became grateful that she could hop a little and crawl a little and make it home. Slowly, she saved her self.

It took her so long to cover those few steps, by the time she made it in, she had forgiven everybody who wasn't there to rescue her, even her father. Once inside the house she knew that she still had to go through with her plans . . . So she killed herself, not all of herself, just the weakest and saddest parts, until the only thing left was her birth right, Eleanor James, a woman of compassion and great power.

But she didn't know that she was becoming all of that at the time; what she did know was the fact that she was dying in all the right places and crying from a darkness that use to make her hollow inside, places that she talked to cover up.

When a car finally passed by that house with the perfect white picket fence on that quiet street, Eleanor was already inside, dialing 911 and her sister. And by then she wanted to live for real this time.

When Alex arrived at the hospital, there where no more tears on Ella's face.

"Eleanor, are those wings I see?" said Alex, gently interrogating her sister. And for the first time in her adult life, Eleanor truly smiled and she was beautiful like her mother, and free. Even with her un-kept hair, dirty clothes, and throbbing foot; she never felt better. And finally she had a story to tell, something interesting to share with Harold, who seemed to have loved her in the dark and in the light. But that would have to wait because she had called her sister first and everybody knows that Alexandria was crazy, but Eleanor often forgot just how far she would go to make a point . . .

(c) Jamillah Warner, www.gospelnerve.com, I got the nerve to say . . .