Whisper feverishly in your head that everything will work out just the way you feverishly hope. It has to because what you see on the inside of your eyelids feels real.
There is a lot of whispering. Months of whispering. So much whispering that it builds and builds and builds until your poor, little skull can’t take the pressure anymore.
This is when you run away.
But is it running away if you’re also running towards something? Because somewhere in that jumbled Jenga tower of a mind, there’s a small seed and that seed is telling you that you deserve better. You deserve much, much better.
And even though this tiny seed is nothing against the power of your heart’s greatest and most foolish wishes, it is still strong enough to tell you that you need to get up and go. Where you are, this seed cannot grow.
So, you get up and go. And by this point in your life, you’ve gotten quite good at that. Does that make the leaving any less heartrending? No.
And so, even though you have made up your mind to go, you can’t resist holding out your hand one last time for a smart rap, a parting welt to remember them all by. Would they crack the ruler across your palm if they didn’t care?
And when you get to where you are going, do you bandage your hand? No. There’s something too comforting about the red because the pain tells you that these relationships, they meant something. Didn’t they?
Replay every single interaction, the fights, the missed calls, the anxious late nights. Over and over, you pore over the game tape. Where was the fault? Where was the miserable fault? What had you done wrong that these people could not figure out how to love you in the ways you’d asked?
Spend a few days counting the ways you have failed. The world is heavy. You wonder what the use of it all was.
But then one morning, you look outside and you see the morning star glittering and the crescent moon hung low and in that moment when you are suspended from the churn of your tiny existence, you think – perhaps, the fault didn’t lie with me after all.
And while that thought only lasts as long as you stand there on the porch, it comes back to you when you’re frying tofu and riding your bike and staring into space. That seed, it finally sprouted.
And the seedling, you realize, is green and it is fresh and it is life, so even though the whispers still swirl, there is now a part of you that wants to protect this possibility.
So, for the next few weeks, you build a greenhouse around it and diligently water it with your tears. Disappointment, realization, truth – they all come bubbling to the surface. It isn’t pretty.
When it is light out, you have the courage to face the pain, but at night, you succumb to those visions, those pretty, little visions of how these relationships could be if only for a day. One day.
Yet despite your weakness, the seedling patiently grows, and as it reaches closer and closer to the roof of that greenhouse, it becomes harder and harder to re-locate the pleasure in what it is that lies in your head. You understand that the time is near, the time when you will have to let go, but oh, the letting go – isn’t that the absolute worst of it? And must you? Must you? Haven’t you let go of enough already? How much more? How much more?
But by now, the whispers have died to a wisp and you can no longer deny that it’s really only your stubbornness that stands in the way.
You read about an ancient tradition that cuts and twists the emotional threads connecting people across space and time. You stomp into the woods and find five sticks, one for everyone who has broken your heart these last few months. You lay the sticks horizontally on the ground, an ascending column, then conjure up the first relationship and squeeze your fists as you think about what it is you want to let go, the new way you wish to relate to this person. You pick up the first stick, rough and knobby, and snap it in two.
When you first learned about this ritual, you’d thought it pretty silly, but that snap. You felt that. So then, the second, the third, the fourth.
You stare down at the last one. You have to. You know you have to, but god, you don’t want to. You really fucking don’t want to. This is the only one you know has no hope which means it’s the one you want the most.
A breath that catches on the sorrow. NO. But the stick is still there.
You fling your head back until there is only blue sky, the bare fingers of the trees that surround you, silent sentries to hear your silent screams. ARE YOU UP THERE? WHY DID THIS HAPPEN TO ME? WHY DID YOU LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME? I DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS. I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS.
The sky does not answer you, but instead, tilts your head back to the ground and gently points to your unfinished business.
“FINE,” you shout, the soundwaves reverberating against the ash gray bark. And then, before you can even think another thought, you reach down and you pick up the stick and you say his name and you split it and that is when one becomes two.
The relief is crisp.
Music Corner: It just has to be U2 & Kansas.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
