It is a privilege, that I do not want anymore, to say your capacity to love has been met in someone from before. I have held crying children of all ages and gathered them against walls and watched a door, terrified, reassuring the people below me that nothing bad would happen. Whoever might be on the other side would have to deal with me, a task nobody wants. Every day I scan a badge and unlock a door that’s got a handle going the wrong way, and I am sure that I have enough capacity to love one hundred and eighty plus two friends, that my capacity is so great I would die for them. On the days that I am not sure, I am sure I must find a way to be.
I hated my father as a child, as an adult I don’t know him well enough to say that with confidence. It was not so much the sins he committed against me as it was the ones he pushed against my mother, who would grip my narrow shoulders while I cried, telling me I had to forgive him. I grew up believing life was a game of tricking yourself to forgive. I did not realize until high school that I was not obligated to forget the things I repeatedly forgave. And it is now, when I am separated and looking from behind, that I am sure I have not forgiven lately but want to forget.
I climbed rocks with my friend in an attempt to exile myself from the house and remembered while gripping the wall unnaturally how I have used my legs and hips to push my body up the wall at my parents’ house. I thought about metaphors I could use to compare life and rock walls and the people that spot you and tell you where to go, but all the metaphors seemed overdone. I thought so much mid-climb that I was left stuck on the wall wondering if I should look behind to see if my friend was watching. I learned that I could ask them to tell me things I didn’t know, halfway up the purple. There has always been someone behind me to tell me to look left, at the place where my right hand can go and at the foothold just a few inches below my dangling foot. I then learned that you do not have to ask for a hand, literal or metaphorical, to be lightly on your back in an offering of reassurance. I’d be okay in a fall. I did fall, poorly, clumsily, and thought it was all funny. I know someone keen to be alone when in reality every person needs another few people, just to look from behind, a little farther away from the close up things we fixate on. Sometimes the people who look from behind will even sit on the edge of a bed before they pass on the job of observation to someone else, just to tell you more terrible things, like how everything ends and how it is inevitable that people fall out of love. It is a horrible thing to know and love and want, only for everything to die away slowly, just the way death learned to execute over time.
My indifferences, aggressively nagging to those that disagree, stem from my new belief: I do not believe that life is defined by the pain we endure. I am determined to live oppositely. I have been loved tenderly only in sleep and baited into live submission by almost all who I have forgiven but not forgotten. I have yet to be fought for in a consequential way—one that assures longevity and that I will find few regrets.
On Wednesday I woke up very sweaty. I had a dream, a sinister one, which told me I am capable of deep and enduring love, and assured me my best friend was not. Someday I will find different assurances and slowly am.
It is okay to not have it all even though that belief contains everything I want and has been my only comfort on nights I couldn’t sleep. I have little bits of everything lately and while I have it in my hands, I will love it hard until I need to let it leave.
