Everything I Cannot Name Yet
There’s a kind of numbing that sets in when you look inward for too long. The mind starts to throb, not from noise, but from the way memories begin to stumble over one another.
And then, softly, you notice the distance — the small, aching slip between what truly happened and what your remembering insists on holding.
We all mentally sieve out parts that highlight us as the problem, and we try to delegate that part to others. Sometimes, we, writers, are the problem, and we need to own that for sanity, and maybe for posterity.
If your truth needs to come dressed in layers, then perhaps it isn’t a truth at all — perhaps it’s only a perception wearing its Sunday best. And that’s fine.
We’re allowed to let the variations in our stories tilt the light a little, show us something we didn’t see before. Life was never meant to be a clean ledger, never a zero-sum anything. It breathes, it bends, it revises itself. And so do we. That is what living looks like most times.
The last couple of months have made food become a balm to my heart, something that must be taken with the hope of healing a body that needs repair, and because I’m doing my best not to be a teetotaler, I have relegated my body to a state where I’m always lacking all the things I crave on a day-to-day basis.
Now I drink water and nibble at the sorts of things birds would bless with their attention. I lie back and study the ceiling as if it might offer answers, then glance at my phone, looking at the glow of a message undoing plans I’d already let myself hope for.
What is before me feels like mountains, sometimes valleys, and other times, all that will come in between. Some days, I can’t define it; I just allow everything to come at me. I let it hit me, and then watch myself. I watch it expose me that my texting game is actually the poorest thing you’d ever experience, and that is why I’m different in person than I am on messaging platforms.
Adding to that, I think of how weak my resolve has been lately, and when I tell my colleague about it, he laughs and says I’m in an arid moment. An enforced sabbatical.
I told him that I’ve never felt so weak to walk away from outright decisions before, and that somewhere in my head, I think it’s not my fault. He laughed again. Of course, it’s my fault, and as always, I’m not supposed to shroud the part where I am the problem. So, it is my fault.
I hang on for too long, I delay too much, I say nothing for too long. But that’s because being in a haste hasn’t helped me over the years. And so I listen, I watch, I overanalyze. I stare, and keep staring.
Some weeks back, right at the beginning of November, someone else said my expectations were too much, and that maybe if I lowered them, I’d let people in, but there aren’t any doors or walls here. No barriers.
Let’s agree I’m the problem — the quiet curse stitched beneath every good intention. The one who moves in the dark, saying nothing until the words are too heavy to hold.
Let’s agree that only saints wander into my orbit, and I, somehow, become the weapon shaped against them. That I’m the one who smudges the smiles off faces, turning good things into something murky, something that refuses a name.
Let’s agree.
Wouldn’t it mean that I’m the one in need of the great virtues they have? The patience they claim to own, the love they claim to have, the joy in friendship they want to see through decades, and the endurance of all that will ever last.
Can’t I be allowed to be a worthy recipient, at least until I find my footing?
Can’t I be permitted to be a work in progress beside their polished completeness?
Can’t I, just once, be everything they ask of me without falling short in the places they never see?
The clarity, the affection, the libidinous desire, and that patience. Is it only for me to give? And why am I the only one being judged?
What I’m accused of feels like a kind of quiet terrorism — every label tossed at me landing like a small, controlled detonation. And I think about it: how my heart is always the first to rush forward, burning with its usual eagerness, only to cool too quickly, as if retreat is its native language.
All of it is a response. All of it is reaction — the kind I sometimes can’t contain, can’t smooth into something gentler. So these days, I’ve taken to watching everything from a distance, even my own heart, as though observation might save me from myself.
The days ahead make me want to upset people’s expectations. The idea of something so dramatic happening to me, and somehow, I feel ready. Ready for everything good. Or even worse.