All I’d ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.
After loving someone you couldn’t depend on, you realize how important it is to trust someone will do what they say. It’s such a simple thing, not to promise what you can’t or won’t deliver. But my mom had done that all the time.
As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.
I knew whatever I said right then she wouldn’t hear; with that kind of pain, a deafness comes.
And I felt comfort. Finally. All I’d wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this. I knew, deep down, it was more complicated than that, but watching Jason, I was hopeful. He took the mess that was Macbeth and fixed it, and I had to wonder if he might, in some small way, be able to do the same for me. So I moved myself closer to him, and I’d been there ever since.
Even when words fail me, you never do.
So it had been me. Maybe I’d known that all along, and that was why I had run. Because I didn’t show weakness: I didn’t depend on anyone. And if he’d been like the others, and just let me go, I would have been fine. It would have been easy to go on conveniently forgetting as I kept my heart clenched tight, away from where anyone could get to it.
Life didn’t begin cleanly, and it surely never ended that way. We were blessed with whatever we had in the middle. It made sense that it be messy, too.
Isn’t it weird? The way you remember things when it’s gone.
What you do in your dreams is never your choice.
The dark was still a mystery, something hidden, something to be scared of, but I’d come to fear the light, too. It was where everything was revealed, or seemed to be.
I mean, at least with an argument, you know what’s happening. Or have some idea. Silence is... it could be anything.
As I spoke, I realized I’d held these words in for so long and so tightly that I felt the space they left empty once released. It was vast enough that I could think of nothing to follow them.
Anger’s not bad,” he said. “It’s human...
It took a lot to have hope in this world where so little evidence of it existed. Maybe if nothing bad had ever happened, you didn’t even consider those clouds and storms ahead. But for the rest of us, even the brightest sunshine carried a chance of rain.
I don’t think I like you.” “A common reaction,” he replied. “I’ll win you over. Eventually.” She.
Eyes closed, I saw only the blackness, reminding me of this one thing, the most deep of my secrets; eyes open, there was only the world that didn’t know it, bright, inescapable, and somehow, still there.
Careful,” she called out to me, her voice sharp; part admonishment, part warning. But I’d been that way all this time, and it hadn’t changed a thing. Maybe it was better to barrel through life, breaking fragile things and catching on every jagged edge. Neat or messy, calm or crazy, I still ended up in this same place.
To summer, and to us.
But I’m kind of used to being invisible,” I continued. “So any kind of attention makes me nervous.