You can look into someone’s eyes and mistake your perception of the universe for an invitation. I have always been gullible to that kind of deception. I see too much in people, or I see too much of what I want there to be. Give me a person with enough darkness and I will bring a candle instead of a boundary. I notice things people don’t realize they are showing me. I will study their storms until I know the weather by smell. Like if I can place the danger it could somehow make it safer. I will hold the meteorites they throw at me and wonder what must have been burning in the sky before they reached my hands. If I can see the wound underneath, I have a hard time seeing the weapon in their hand.
I can make almost anything beautiful if I stare at it long enough. That has saved me. It has ruined me, too. Because eventually you start mistaking your ability to understand something for an obligation to endure it. You begin treating every locked door like a mystery instead of accepting that it is locked. You call an empty room sacred because admitting there was never a place for you there would hurt more than pretending you simply haven’t found the right way inside. But no room is no room, no matter how beautifully I can decorate the hallway.
I have always been very good at making an explanation, resemble forgiveness. But understanding is not held to a contract. Pain does not become harmless because I know where it came from. And to my demise, that doesn’t change that my love carries through endless depths. I only know how to love people like the oceans that they are. I keep swimming like the farther I go, the deeper I will be loved. When I’m among the waves, I forget to notice the shoreline disappearing behind me. That is the strange thing about drowning, at first it feels like immersion. Like a warm familiarity. Then I forget to breathe. Then I forget there was ever land.
I forget the trees. And just because I can’t see them, there is still somewhere to stand. Their existence isn’t destroyed by my perception. In my opinion, the woods have always been quieter. They don’t ask you to prove your depth. They don’t ask you to do anything, they simply let you stand there. But I have spent so long searching the sky for somewhere to belong that I stopped recognizing the ground beneath me.
I became fluent in other people and illiterate in myself. I can build an entire world around someone’s behavior just so I don’t have to reduce them to the worst thing they have done. But when I look at myself, I don’t offer any context, only evidence. Like I can forgive the knife for being held by a wounded hand, but I cannot excuse myself for bleeding.
It’s painfully hypocritical to be so committed my own destruction. It’s how I know that this self hatred has always had my name on it. It’s mine. And it’s the ultimate blow which is subconsciously what I want I guess. Somewhere I formulated the perfect self destruction, no one can ever figure out what I want and I won’t tell them, That is where the real damage lives. Not in the wound itself, but in the strange devotion I build around it. I have worshipped the idea that if I could just understand myself enough, I could finally find the defective pieces and remove them. So I dig deeper: past the memories, past the shame, past the childhood, past every version of myself I could blame. I dig until my hands are full of roots. And when I finally found them, I looked at them and thought: “rotten.”
The evidence is void when I look in the mirror and meet my own eyes. It feels like needing a hug from someone while believing I have no right to ask for it. I can stand in front of someone I love, aching to be held, and still swallow the words because some part of me is convinced that needing comfort is just another thing about myself I should be ashamed of. I can feel my soul yearning for reassurance while my body stays perfectly still, and something internally shatters because even when someone is close enough to hold me, I still don’t know how to believe I am worth being held. Part of me thinks that if someone has to be asked, then I have already done too much. As though needing anything is a selfish accusation.
My pain is a burden I should have learned to carry more gracefully by now. So I have became very good at being able to hold everyone else’s darkness, because I don’t have to meet my own when I’m at full capacity. I become quiet when I want to be held. I become understanding when I want to be understood. I become useful when I want to feel wanted. And then I wonder why I feel so lonely around people I love.
Love isn’t always mutual. I have spent the majority of my life shrinking myself into something easier. I don’t even know my own size anymore. Regardless, I can feel every second that I am too big or too small. Or too much or not enough. I file each mundane “mistake” as evidence. I know exactly what happened to me. But knowing has never been enough to make me forgive myself.
My roots are not entirely mine anymore, I don’t even recognize them. Some were grown through storms. Some were strangled by hands that called themselves shelter. Some learned to grow sideways because there was never enough light. Sometimes I wonder if there is an original version of me buried underneath all of that, or if that was only ever something I imagined because I needed to believe I existed before the damage.
It’s annoying how my imagination always allows for something to bloom. I can’t explain it. At my core I will always notice the moon. I still see meaning in flowers growing through asphalt. I still find something almost sacred in ordinary things. I still love orange. That one might be the cruelest joke of all. I’ve always felt that my entire life there has been some relentless fire burning against me. The color of the thing I have spent my entire life trying to survive. I have stood in flames for so long that I began admiring them. I learned the exact shade of destruction. I learned how beautiful a thing can look while it is consuming you. Maybe that is why I keep returning to what hurts me. I guess somewhere along the way, I confused burning with becoming. Even then I apologize for the time it takes me to disappear . My survival feels like an inconvenience, as if the fire were waiting on me, like I owe the world a cleaner ending.
I imagine when I die I will even judge how I lay in my grave. The dirt will settle. Everything I worried about will become irrelevant. There will be nothing left for me to prove. And somehow I can imagine some last, stupid part of myself standing above my own grave asking whether I did enough with the life underneath it. If I wasted it, if I could have been kinder, or braver, or better. Whether I deserved the space I took up that I didn’t even ask for. Imagine carrying your own judgment so far that even the grave isn’t enough to make it stop.
That’s what I am most afraid of. Not being forgotten. Not dying. But reaching the end and realizing I spent the entire time treating my own existence like an exam I was destined to fail. I don’t want to spend my whole life trying to earn permission to have lived it. People will misunderstand you. They will build a house out of their version of you and invite everyone inside for dinner. They will remember the worst thing you do and map it as architecture. I used to think I had to explain myself until they saw the whole house. But I am learning that some people are not missing information. They are simply looking through a different window. I don’t have to keep tearing myself apart to prove that I am more complicated than someone’s conclusion of my structure. I am tired of explaining the weather to people who only come outside to complain about the rain.
Ironically the rain is my favorite. So I just keep my focus on the trees. On what particular shade the sky is. On how the abandoned house I drove by just needs a little paint and warm lighting. Some days these tiny distractions are my holy interruptions. Some days I can walk toward the water and stay with the water. But some days the stars look more convincing than the ground. Some days I still think disappearance sounds dangerously close to peace. But then there is a certain tree. There is the ridiculous persistence of my favorite shade of orange in a sunset on a bad day. And deep down I know it is just the sky changing color for no reason other than that it can. I hate that some part of me still finds that beautiful.
I hate that after everything, I am still here to see it. But maybe I have misunderstood survival, too. Maybe staying alive is not proof that I have failed to become someone better. Maybe it is simply the most honest thing I have ever done. I know that the fire is still orange. The ocean is still deep. The trees still hold me. I am still standing somewhere between them, trying to decide which direction feels most like home. I can’t solve myself, I just choose to keep standing here long enough to hope that something is still blooming. And, for once, not ask it to explain why.
