Catastrophe of Chaos

They name this land wild, but I daresay it mirrors the hearts of the folk who endure it.

The forest crouches at the back of the cabin like something waiting to devour or deliver me. Even when the wind stills, the tall pines breathe. Resin stings the air, and sap runs like blood.

I have lived here long enough for the trees to recognize my scent and the creek to know the measure of my step. Long sufficient for rumor to forget my name and remember only its favorite shape of me: witch, omen, curse.

Most mornings, I rise before the light. I don’t need much—just the quiet and the knowing I am alone. Solitude keeps me safe. Solitude keeps the curse at bay.

You see, I learned early what my kindness could do. The first time I offered it, my father’s horse stumbled and broke his neck on the ridge. The second time, a neighbor’s barn burned to ash the night after I bandaged his son’s hand. The third—well, that one I don’t speak of. It took everything soft left in me.

So now, I do not touch. I do not smile. I keep my voice buried where it can do no harm.

And still—he comes.

Ansel.

He thinks I do not see him, but I always do.

He arrives with the dawn, when the ground still wears its veil of morning vapor. Stacking wood beneath my porch, each log aligned neat as pews on a Sunday. Leaving parcels wrapped in cloth—bread that holds the heat of his hands, apples warm with his keeping, soap that smells of pine. Sometimes he hums. Always the same tune.

He never knocks. The sound of his boots outside my door is enough to wake every ghost in me.

I watch him through the gap in the shutters, heart aching in its cage.

He moves like the earth trusts him.

Once, when winter bit deep and the creek froze solid, he built a fire outside my door and left it burning. I wanted to step out, to thank him, even reached for the latch—but the memory of that curse dragged me back.

I’ve seen what happens when I give. The world answers with ruin.

So I hide.

Every kindness he leaves, I accept like a thief. Every breath he spends near me, I hold like contraband.

Still, I do not let him see me.

Not my face. Not the tremor in my hands. Not the way his name hums under my breath when the night grows too long.

Love is not safe. Never was.

The creek betrayed me.

I went for mint, wild and sharp, which grows near moving water. The air smelled of rain and loam, rich with the promise of thawing soil. I knelt in the shallows, skirt hem darkening, and bent to cut the stems.

That’s when I heard him.

The crunch of boots on wet stone. The shift of weight that wasn’t mine.

I froze. I knew that sound. I listened to it for years through the cracks in my shutters.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

His voice—deep as the creek and gentle as spring rain.

I didn’t turn. I couldn’t.

Silence gathered between us, heavy as breath before confession.

“I won’t bother you,” he said after a moment. “Just passing through.”

But his steps didn’t move away.

The air stilled, humming with the small, invisible threads binding one heart to another. I tried to stand, but my knees wouldn’t obey.

He came closer. Knelt down. I hear the leather of his coat creak, and the faint rasp of his breath steady.

When he spoke again, it was softer. “You’re Ophelia, aren’t you?”

The sound of my name—God, to hear it out loud after so long, cracked something inside me.

I didn’t answer.

He must’ve understood, letting the quiet grow until it no longer frightened me. Then, slow as dusk settling, he scooted closer.

The world held its breath with me.

I felt the warmth of him before I saw his shadow cross mine. He reached out—not to touch, to offer. His hand hovered between us, fingers steady, palm open.

I offered a single sprig of mint, trembling in my hand.

He took it with a smile that melted me. His thumb brushed the inside of my wrist, and I swear the earth shifted beneath my feet.

I waited for the curse—for the sky to rip asunder and the ground to swallow us for our daring—but the only thunder came from my chest.

He leaned in, breathed my name again, “Ophelia,” and I came undone. 

He came closer. Another breath, we were one tremor apart. My body knew him before my mind allowed the knowing. His scent—smoke, pine, the iron edge of riverwater—embraced me.

I don’t remember closing the space between us, only the taste of smoke and winter and mint when our mouths met. The first brush of his lips no more than a sigh against mine. The second was fire.

The wind rose, the trees bowed, and I thought the world split to swallow us whole.

Then—light.

His hands framed my face, careful, reverent, as if he feared I might dissolve. My own hands—traitors—found the back of his neck, felt the pulse beating there, alive, alive, alive.

Every story I ever told myself about ruin unraveled beneath his touch.

For a heartbeat, I thought we might both burn for it—and I wanted to.

When he pulled away, the world still existed.

No curse. No ruin. Only the rush of the creek and the sound of our hearts, wild and unashamed.

“Ophelia,” he said again.

I leaned into him, the way confession leans into forgiveness, and stopped hiding from his light.

His forehead found mine. The breath between us became the same breath. The fear I called faith all my life simply…left.

Six years have passed since that day, though sometimes it feels like only one long, merciful breath.

The cabin still stands, though the shutters hang crooked now from small hands and larger laughter.

Eli came first, red-faced and furious at how hard it was to arrive. He yelled until his voice learned us. Now he yells for different reasons—because a frog escaped his pocket, because the dog stole his heel of bread, because he loves to hear how the world throws his sound back at him.

Wren followed, her hair the color of harvest wheat. She rearranges every fine thing until it feels more true under her hands. She keeps a blue jay’s feather in her pocket and the mint patch near the creek under strict watch—no pulling stems too high, no stripping leaves without asking the plant first.

Nora arrived in a thunderstorm that sounded like a regiment of heaven’s own drummers beating out the Lord’s declaration across the hills. She sleeps against my chest, mouth open, breath warm on my collarbone. When she wakes, she looks as though astonished the world yet turns. I recognize the startle. I carry less of it now.

Ansel is by the hearth, mending a wooden horse whose ear decided to be a boat. Holding the small thing as if its heart depends on his steadiness. His hands do what they always do—make true what they touch.

When he glances up, the light catches in his eyes, that same quiet fire I saw by the creek.

He smiles. My heart answers.

Sometimes, when the kettle wails and the dog barks and a child spills milk and a log gives way in the stove and the wind shoulders the door so hard it swings open, I laugh.

The old me would have named it calamity—the string of small cruelties always ending in ruin. The woman I am now calls it morning, plain and blessed as the first light upon the sill.

Life, the kind that used to terrify me, breathes here: muddy prints hand-laddered up the wall, a bread heel tucked into a boot, an ant parade conquering the sugar bowl, a lopsided fort swallowing the neat stack of wood Ansel can’t help but arrange and rearrange because he came into love as a man who thought order the only thing that kept a soul from rattling apart.

Now we rattle together, and none of the pieces feel like they’re falling.

Not all the old omens are gone. Sometimes a crow perches on the lintel and watches me plait Wren’s hair. Sometimes lightning walks on its hind legs over the far field and counts itself down toward the cottonwoods.

Once, Eli came home with a snake braided around his wrist like a green bracelet and looked at me with the gall of a boy who asks the world for everything. I pressed leaves into a poultice for the bite. I whispered the old words Mama taught me when the fever took my own brother: Come back. Come back. The fever turned its face away. Eli’s wrist healed under a moon showy in its mercy. The crows flew on.

When I hand bread to a stranger now, I do not hold my breath to hear what will die. When a widow sits at my table and all she can manage is wrapping her hands around the heat of the teacup, I lay my palm on the table between us where she can see it. If she takes it, she takes it. If she doesn’t, I am the same.

Ansel still brings wood to the porch. Habit, he says with a wry smile, kissing the corner of my mouth where the line of it tilts when I am trying not to laugh. Gratitude, I think, for the precarious shelter we keep making and remaking every day, the way two hands make a bed in a house that will always need the bed made again.

I redefined curse, not as a consequence for the crime of tenderness, but as a story fear told me to keep me obedient.

Those days, I believed kindness would kill me; I wasn’t entirely wrong. Something did die. A small, clenched thing mistook survival for a life. In its place—noise, mess, sweetness, grief comes and goes like weather, but never set up house the way it did before, joy so vast it rings from the rafters.

Chaos, I’ve learned, is just another word for living.

For love that spills past its borders.

For the wild, tangled grace of being seen.

Sometimes, when the children are chasing geese down by the creek, he’ll slip behind me, arms circling my waist, chin resting in the curve of my shoulder.

“You remember,” he’ll whisper, “how you used to hide from me?”

I laugh. “You’re sure I ever stopped?”

He kisses the hollow below my ear. “You did the moment you handed me that mint.”

I suppose he’s right.

If chaos means muddy boots and bread crumbs in bed and mint hung on a string above the hearth to dry and a man who chooses me every morning as if choosing were a ritual he refuses to let go stale, then give me chaos, full measure, pressed down, running over.

If chaos means my name said out loud in the mouth of someone who knows how to hold it without breaking it, then let it keep coming. I’ll open the gate. Swing it wide.

Because I learned the shape of my life is not a fence.

It is a door. A hand. A sprig of mint, cool in a palm, passed to the one who will make a home of it.

And when the wind hammers the pines and lightning rehearses in the distance. The creek climbs its banks and the children sleep through it like saints drunk on milk, I press my lips to Ansel’s shoulder, feel the old hum in his bones, and know this simple, ferocious truth with the certainty of a woman who does not need the world’s permission anymore:

Chaos has different meanings, and I have chosen mine.

Sometimes I catch Ansel watching me from across the water, that same quiet reverence in his eyes. I think—if this is chaos, then let the world burn.

Because I’ve finally learned how to live inside the fire.