salt

Don’t look back, He said, lest you turn to salt;

it’s time to do new things, and forget the old –

every day is a new day – His mercies are new every morning…

… yet she continues to catalog every moment, every notch, marking time, (and again for good measure), wondering when she might be free.

His mercies are new every morning. She wakes and tries to capture the newness but it slips through her fingers and is gone with the dew.

She strains her eyes to look forward, veins busting from her neck, muscles groaning under the strain to look ahead and not behind; still, her mind betrays her and I find her sitting in the archives, turned over boxes, files askew, piles of memories gone sour, the smell of moth-eaten cloth and mildew.

I stand at the door and wait. She looks up from her industrious ruminating. I see the pain. The brokenness. The fret of wrong decisions yet to reveal themselves. Anxiety hovering over her like the grim reaper.

And I get it now – the new mercies thing – they have to be new every morning, for how else will we break free from these chains? How else will we learn to walk forward, refrain from looking back, and not turn to salt?