I was a young teenager when a traveler told me that the flat mole above my belly button meant I would be a young widow. Back then, I didn’t imagine I would ever marry.
Mamasaur calls moles like that beautymarks.
Sometimes, on the days that grief chases me, I cover it with make up even though I would never wear anything where it would show. I’m not sure if it makes me more sad, or less sad, to think it was all written before I walked it, but escaping for a day makes me breathe easier either way.
I like a good escape.
Over the last year, I’ve developed a smattering of smaller marks along my side and belly. The doctor could tell me that they were safe, but she could not tell me what destiny they foretold.
They look like constellations, and I like that the widow mole is widowed no longer, just one in an accompaniment of stars. Stars I have not named or counted.
My heart this year has asked me to stop counting.
At first I ignored it because I thought I was escaping again. If I don’t hold my feet very firmly to the ground, the clouds pull me away, the desert calls me, the forest folds in around me.
I like a good escape.
Mamasaur is made of magic, and my father was made of math, and I think it is only a perfect blend of the two that allows me to wake up in this world unspun from everything that has happened, or could.
Rarasaur blog turned 10 years old yesterday. What a perfect little beautymark to end my obsession with counting on.
If I’m being completely honest, bone-scrapingly honest, sometimes I think I have outgrown this warm and loving nest. But then I come home to it, and remember that it has grown, too.
It is a living place, and it is math to say I don’t know how I happened upon something so impossible, but it is magic to say that I do.
I was not-yet-thirty when my late husband, the most impossible human I’ve ever met, turned around his laptop and declared that he made me a blog. Just like that.
The mole on my belly told a future tale that became a past one, and my late love created something for me that outlived him but not us, and I don’t think I really understand any of this stuff, but it pulls me close to the soil of the earth.
It all keeps me here. It all stays with me. A galaxy of life, writing itself into my time and my skin.
I am not-quite forty, and I storytell everything myself now, because life has been long and windy, and I have become the traveler. I find my way by anything marked by beauty, and if I do not escape, and if I manage to wait, I have learned that the beauty always multiplies.
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Happy blogiversary to this little dino nest. Happy birthday to us. I have always loved celebrating together. ❤
P.S. Some lovely kind words from Dinah to celebrate year 10: https://withangelsandelephants.com/
P.P.S. You are loved
rarasaur 