I used to commend my hands for the ability to take the wheel, turn the noise in my head off and stream my consciousness onto paper. That is, until I realized the words I wrote out were just covert explanations I could have shared but didn’t, the road ending and hands resting only once my truth was stripped bear on ink stained paper.
I wrote dialogues and scenarios between characters then read them back just to realize that all I wrote were things I wanted to say or do with him. I guess it’s a pro in some ways, at least I’m writing. At least I can name some hurdles now, at least I managed to scatter morsels of truth and humanity into stories that readers buy as an easy and sexy read.
Dreams have been the one thing I always fell back on since I can remember, lately no matter what plane I land on, his essence manages to make its presence felt. Sometimes I wake up and want to text him and ask if he was trying to reach me in the dreamscape or if his soul just found it’s way into my silly little worlds, if he liked what he saw or if he even remember being there. I wanted so badly for good things to come from our knowing each other but I don’t think we stood a chance with the mile high walls we both built up all those years ago and opted to pretend didn’t exist anymore.
I write about what it took to build these walls and why the jagged edges around them never healed quite right. Every other word tinged with the feelings I held and waited on, hoping he’d be the one to pull us through to the other side. I blame myself for being too damn prideful and not reaching for him when I know so painfully well that if I knocked on that door; things would be different today. I know that’s something I could work on, being hesitant to feel anything because with every feeling comes equal or worse on the opposite side of the spectrum.
So here I go, trudging along, analyzing feelings and reaching conclusions before my body is able to form a normal response to thoughts that come attached with vulnerability. If I wanted to have him, I had to be ready to also potentially lose him. Which happened anyway, without experiencing the good part. I guess I can add too damn impatient to the running list of “too much” I’ve compiled.
I’ve always been told that I’m too much. Too scatterbrained, too idealistic, too realistic or nihilistic. I was too sarcastic for my age, the questions I asked and narratives I spun too complex and complicated to have spawned from a child’s mind. I loved too hard, my emotional withdrawal too cold. My aspirations were naive and my dreams were just that, dreams.
I wasn’t taught that middle grounds exist. Because of that I unknowingly lived in that grey area all while failing to realize that I had painted myself to match the mental prison I foolishly confused as safety. I instead opted to put on rose colored glasses any time I peered over the same rails I couldn’t accept existed. For the first 15 years of my life I was so neutral. Always seen shining, never heard crying, the humor I had; fashioned into armor for when things were hard, my sister hadn’t smiled in weeks or we needed a laugh after another heavy day.
I despised seeing conflict, so I tried to avoid creating any if I could. Confrontations never ended well and my parents didn’t seem to understand that while the words exchanged between each other cut them, it all bled onto us. It’s been a long road, the road to accepting that the relationship I had with my parents was conditional. Be good, make good, do good — or else. I hadn’t figured out what the else was until the freshly minted 15 year old version of me was dealt a real crap hand.
I won’t tell the full story of how I wound up living out of state at 16 because I don’t like to look back at what it was that led me to leaving the only life I knew behind. I’ve never asked my parents why it was so easy to offer me an out instead of holding me tighter as I healed. I knew the answer, my body was storing trauma and once that set in — I stopped being their perfect girl.
I don’t think of her anymore, that bomb in a birdcage girl who ran away to a city where faces blurred together and no one knew. She worked her feet till they bled and broke, marring and staining her skin so that the outside matched the inside. The girl that lost the last dream she had at 16 with two missed steps and a surgery. That poor thing that had to start a new canvas with only blood for paint. No, that’s not a door I enjoy opening. I closed that door years ago after countless agonizingly long sessions in therapy and another batch of intellectualized conclusions I labeled as healing.
I didn’t think I had to explain how I became the person I am today. That’s the funny thing about my memory, I remember everything when I’m feeling, but I actively chose to be numb for more years than I have fingers. Each passing day I step closer to the conclusion that I can’t fold every feeling into a nice crisp square and file it into the “too much to handle” file. I can’t switch cities anytime something bad or unexpected happens, or at least I shouldn’t.
Still, I think too much, I talk too much, I criticize myself too much, I over function too much, I sometimes drink too much and I certainly romanticize existencial sufferance far too much. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be less, that I forgot that in order to live authentically I needed to accept all my parts, even the ugly ones. I guess that’s what this letter is, me addressing my own humanity and offering grace to the girl I once was and decided was too weak to make room for in the book of me.
That being said, I know I’m a lot of things. I’m a chronic people pleaser, I’m also the one call most would rush to make from the precinct or when things get sticky. I don’t finish anything I start if it’s my own brain child, but I can write a corny novel for a paycheck in a month. I intellectualize everything to point of detachment, but I also see patterns most people miss. I’m aware that I seem unbothered and aloof, but seeming is safer than being.
My being covered by mask after mask of disguises I created and had to use to protect the soft parts of me I knew still exist within me. Behind the masks of doing is being, my core essence soft, fiercely protective, teetering on clairvoyant, passionately loving and endlessly imaginative. I felt safe with him, I remembered that softness when he was around. Actually, I remember everything about the time I spent with him. I felt myself aching to peek out from behind the curtain every time he smirked or smiled that way he did which never failed to make me weak in the knees.
I sometimes romanticize the tension in the air between us by calculating and speculating over books on the cosmos that explain each of his actions or lack thereof. I ask trivial questions like what he’d do in a zombie apocalypse, or pull stories out of him by offering my own in exchange. I never wanted to make him uncomfortable with my curiosity, because that meant I would have to get real too. So I spoke my truth through examples, I showed him the tools I use and offer to others, hoping he’d see I could handle anything thrown at me.
There goes another mask, another protective layer after another pause and hesitation. Why do I seek out explanations and achieve realization if I do nothing about it? And then there’s him. Him with the warm smile, floppy hair and steady strong hands. Him, the one that I so badly want to show the softness I hid within armor. He was so damn hard to know, yet somehow so easy to understand.
It’s draining sometimes, having all this information and being unable to verbalize it or make any sense of it in conversation. I saw more of him than I think he realized, and because I knew… I didn’t want to push. I have made a bad habit of planting seeds in conversation, expecting sprouts to emerge sporadically to avoid a full fledged confrontation or neck rearing realization.
I blame my apprehension toward full disclosure for being the double edged sword that nudged us toward this path of nothingness. Funny how discussions not had can be more telling than the explanation itself sometimes. I told him once, to know deeply is the only way I crave to know, to feel richly and with abandon is what I yearn for. I see it in the stars and in his eyes, when he did — he loved and felt deeply as I do. Once the flood gates opened it would be damn near impossible to close them. It’s a damn shame we never got to feel it with eachother really.
Fuck, remember how good it felt all those years ago? Allowing the feeling? I remember how much it hurt too. I sit with both those feelings often, wondering if the good times ever really could equate to the scars left behind. I was happy before him, waist deep in my journey of self reflection and rebuilding a foundation on a bed of scars no longer fresh when he came into the picture. I’d been good alone, I’d done what I could to blast off the mental and physical evidence my experiences created so they wouldn’t steer my present or mar my future.
The issue that ended us was that the next phase of my healing is letting love in, opening myself up to work through the relational hills and dips that only growing love can and will surely bring about. The next step of understanding myself more deeply when inhibitions fly, bets are off and I’m all in. Why is that so scary to me? What was I so afraid of? It couldn’t have been worse than what I’m feeling today.
I’m angry. I’m angry at myself and angry at him for allowing us stay in this cycle instead of moving forward, shying away from the promise of a feeling so lovely it makes us cower and bare our teeth. I resent myself for playing coy and acting like this uncertain limbo we played for months wasn’t dredging up old feelings of unworthiness and feelings of lack within me. I want to shake myself out of it every time I question whether he didn’t see himself with me because I have scribbles all over my body or because I talk about peculiar things or just too much in general.
I can’t dwell on it much longer. A new season of change is knocking at my door, and I have a whole new book of lessons that life is ready to hand me the pen for, and I’m excited for it all.
I know, I know… I’m running away again, but I just can’t help but feel this next one will stick. I also can’t help but feel a bitter sweet longing for him to have been able to join me on this next string of events — the stars would have smiled down on us both for it.
Life won’t stop though, it’s all happening here and now. It won’t ever stop as surely as the sun warms the earth and moon rules our waters.
The best is yet to come. At least that’s what I need to tell myself for now.
