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

and 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

and 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 I am not lonely.

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

from 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

and 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.

With everyone else,

love arrives

with its fine print.

Be softer. Be steadier.

Be the version of yourself

that is easiest to be around.

Do not overflow.

Do not ask too much.

Do not let them see

the parts of you

that are still, after all this time,

a little wild with grief.

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.