I can remember it so well that I almost choke on the memory sometimes. 

I was driving through my hometown, it was a rainy day. I watched the beads of water race down my windshield; seemingly competing for which one could sink under the hood of my car first. I remember envying those raindrops. Wishing I could sink someplace where no one would find me. 

As I made the turn around a curved road that overlooked the lake, the song changed. The words of “Smoke Signals” by Phoebe Bridgers began playing. The song filled my car, filled my heart. I played it again and again. 

There was one line in particular that made my breath hitch. “I buried a hatchet, it’s coming up lavender,” Bridgers sang solemnly. 

The beautiful thing about music is that by nature it is interpretive. The artist’s intentions marry with the emotional precursor of whoever is listening and the whole song becomes like a watercolor painting; mixing two people’s pain, their joy, their perspectives and creating something really lovely. 

The verse is followed up by “The future’s unwritten, the rest is a corridor,” and when I heard this it was as if my heart sank into my stomach and then came back up to its surface. 

Sometimes I have felt so stuck in the past it’s almost as if I live there. As if I am not a resident in the present day. As if I’m some kind of martyr who needs to die by my memories over and over just to prove I can still bleed for them. 

And hearing the pair of these two lines together created some kind of space for me to stop and think. 

I am not a hateful person, it takes so much for me to be angry, but before this day I had felt so angry for many months. Angry at the heartbreak I had endured. Angry that I had to carry the weight of it. Angry that I only led with the best of intentions and was left in ruins as if I somehow deserved that kind of ending. 

It may sound trivial or dramatic that a fleeting moment like this could change the course of my thought process. I know how it reads that one song, a couple lyrics and a car ride really made a change for me, but they did. 

I wanted to bury a hatchet that came up lavender. I didn’t want to forgive and forget, but I wanted to make something beautiful out of the bad that I endured. And more than anything, I didn’t want to carry the heaviness in my heart that constantly felt like a punishment for a crime I didn’t commit. 

I didn’t want to live in the past nor did I want to be confined to a corridor. I wanted to see the future that was unwritten, I wanted to write it. 

So here I am doing just that. 

Once I felt the weight lift off of my shoulders and gained the strength to embrace the rest of my life with open arms, I fell in love again. I fell in love with the world, with sunshine rather than rain, with the way a melody can dictate how you move through your days. 

I buried a hatchet, and it came up lavender. Now I will write the rest of my life.

This story was written by Grace Cady. She can be reached at [email protected].