The Love Song of Helen Delacroix

by Laura Saint Martin

There is room enough for romance in these bones, rationed as they are, all the screws and plates and breaks perfect places for love, or disease, to flourish. My only problem being, I’ve never learned the difference.

Room enough…

World enough and time…

Who said that?

As a single mother on the autism spectrum, I have world in abundance, in all its fierce, screaming-neon, knife-faceted fecundity.

Time? A noble gas.

I’m plastered like a diplomat’s passport with diagnoses, a regular walking DSM V, with just enough sense to feel like shit about it. If my bones are porous, my ego’s worse, gapped as a tweaker’s teeth and sucking twice as hard at every form of abuse known to humankind.

What is my savant? As though I am required to have one, the sole quantification of my existence. Lebensunwertes Leben. Life unworthy of life. Isn’t it enough to love life? Must it love you back? I am more alive, I think, than most, as though I can reach into the earth and feel all of humanity, all of life, and synchronize every beating heart. I am the watcher, purveyor of the bigger picture, apart, but part of. I’m more connected than all the social butterflies with their short attention spans, their constant search for a bigger flower, a brighter sun. I have world enough and time to feel all that life, to soothe it into one giant pulse.

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Laura Saint Martin is an emerging writer, working on a mystery series set in the foothills of Southern California, featuring horses and their eccentric but brave owners. She also writes poetry about life on the autism spectrum, mental health, blue collar struggles, and animals and nature.