PARAVOID

Writing things down that would never survive being spoken is partly because nobody is watching or listening, partly because the pace of writing is slower and gives the truer thing time to surface instead of the easier thing that usually wins the race to the tongue.

For a while it is easy not to look too closely at what is actually happening between the one who hopes and the one who simply exists within that hope, and that hope has a way of filling in gaps that should have been left empty, of answering no questions whether something is being met with anything resembling the same intention.

The self that has already made peace with it knows something those blind eyes do not, that a life without another person at the center of it is not the end of anything, that wholeness is not something that can only be confirmed by someone else's presence, that the silence of a life lived on your own terms is not emptiness but the comfort of someone who has already made the most important peace available to any person, the peace between themselves and the life they are actually living.

Not in the way you want things out of obligation, but in the real way, the way that makes you set your alarm earlier than necessary and go to bed the night before already looking forward to the morning. And then the body woke up with something wrong out of sickness, out of all the mornings it could have chosen, and the changing weather outside added itself to the damage, both of which resulted that today was not going to go the way I had planned, or hoped for, or been counting on.

And me in the middle of it trying to find the peace to rest when what I actually feel is lost.

I know what it feels like to absorb someone else's cruelty, a slow and invisible kind of dying that happens in the chest where nobody can see it, where you keep returning to what was said and finding new ways to believe it was true. And I know the shame of having said something in anger that I watched land on another person in a way that I could not take back, that is the venom, spoken in carelessness, in such moment that no apology can fully remedy it no matter how sincerely you try.

And most of us do not talk that enough about how much power lives inside the ordinary act of opening your mouth.

I am delighted for the things I wanted that never came because they kept my hands empty long enough to receive something I never thought to ask for, because want is loud and impatient and sure of itself, but need is wiser and it waits, and it knows better than you do what you are actually ready for.

And life has never given me everything I wanted, but having that said, it has never once failed to give me exactly what I needed.

The one who had so many dreams but so little belief that she was actually capable of reaching them. I wish I could go back and tell her that the life ahead though far from perfect is one she will survive and even learn to be proud of, and that the hard parts do not last that long, that the right people do eventually come.

And that she is so much more than what the world made her feel.