PERHAPS {little personal}

There is a particular kind of exhaustion, that has nothing to do with sleep.

It lives in the chest.

It makes generosity difficult, not because the heart is selfish,

but because a well that has never been filled cannot be blamed for having nothing to offer.

I know this about myself now. I hold it gently. I do not say it out loud.

I have been sick in ways that nobody documented.

Fevers that broke quietly.

Nights the body waged its small wars and I was both the wounded & the nurse

the one shaking and the one saying you will be fine, you have to be fine,

there is no one coming, so you have to be fine.

Not once did I crumble.

But I want you to understand what it costs this relentless, graceful self-rescue.

What it takes from a person to be, for years, the only one who notices when she is not okay.

Perhaps, in another universe,

I arrive into rooms already belonging to them.

I do not have to make myself, light enough, small enough, grateful enough to be kept.

So I breathe alone. I come back to myself alone. 

I talk myself down from the ledge of my own panic with no voice but mine.

I do it. I always do it.

But God,

the doing of it

takes something from me

every single time.

Perhaps, in another universe,

I do not have to audition for belonging. I am still here. 

Still filling. Still trying. Still turning the volume up so the silence doesn't ask its hardest questions.

But if you look closely and I mean closely you will see it.

That quiet space beside me shaped exactly like her.

That I have been walking around,

this whole time leaving room

for someone who is never coming back.

There is a specific grief that does not announce itself at funerals.

It arrives, instead, in dressing rooms in that half-second where you step out in something new

and turn, without thinking, toward a face that the room no longer contains.

It arrives in the suspended moment before a phone call you have dialed a thousand times in your mind

and never once been able to make.

In the advice that rises to the surface of every hard decision and dissolves there

unanswered, unclaimed, floating somewhere

between your ribcage

and whatever comes after.

When the anxiety rises and it does,

like floodwater, like a room slowly losing its air there is a name I do not call.

Not because I have forgotten it.

But because she is not reachable by anything I own.

And so I breathe myself back.

I speak to myself in the gentlest voice I can find,

which is sometimes gentle enough and sometimes not quite.

I come back alone.

I always come back alone.

And I do not say this to be pitied.

I say it because it is

the truest thing about me

this returning,

this relentless, quiet returning,

to a self that has learned

to be its own rescue.

I want to say the books are enough, the phone calls, the curated hobbies,

the careful architecture of a life that looks, from a distance, quite full.

But there is a difference between a life that is full and a life that is held.

And I have spent so long

furnishing the former

that some days I forget

I was ever meant

to have the latter.

I do not blame the ones who remain. I am grateful but then you see,

They have their own weather.

Their own rooms that close at night.

Their own names being called by their own people.

I understand this. I simply understand it, ffrom a particular distance

the distance of someone who has learned that need, expressed too openly,

has a way of making people suddenly, briefly, unavailable.

Perhaps, in another universe, there is someone who picks up on the first ring.

Who says nothing clever. Who offers no solutions.

Who simply says I know. I know. I'm here.

And means it without the quiet asterisk of their own exhaustion, their own life

pressing in at the edges of my name.

Perhaps, in another universe,

I do not do the math before I speak.

I do not measure my grief against the patience of the room.

I do not make myself smaller, quieter, more palatable more worthy of the love that should have simply

been my birthright.

 

She was my first home.

And when she left, I lost the only place where I had ever been

completely, effortlessly known.

Every house since has been a structure.

Four walls. A roof. A door. Functional. Correct.

But a home is a different thing entirely.

A home is someone who already knows

which silence means you're sad & which means you're simply thinking.

Who saves you the window seat without being asked.

Who sees you in something new and says yes. that one. that is you.

I have not lived there

in a very long time.

And I try.

God, I try.

I smooth my edges.

I make myself

a room that is easy to enter.

But she,

she would have loved me in the middle of the overflow.

She would have loved me loudest precisely when I was hardest to love.

That is the thing about mothers. The real ones. The ones who stay.

They do not love you despite what you are.

They love you

as what you are

completely,

without the prerequisite

of your performance.

I do not grieve only her.

I grieve the version of me 

she was the only one

still keeping alive

the one who did not have to earn it.

The one who could fall apart and still be somebody's everything.

The one who was loved not as a finished thing but as a living, breathing, still-becoming one.

I do not grieve what was taken.

I grieve what was never given

the ordinary tenderness

that some people receive simply by existing,

simply by being someone's.