I will not be great, but I’m grateful to get through. - Hozier
When everything is over, it is the silence I come home to. Even when I was walking the street knowing any minute soon I’d be standing at the front door fumbling through my bag for the key to our house, I was aware of the quiet after-dawn where the sky had just transitioned from the color of lovers to the clearness of still blue and the rest is just about to wake. I stopped just to take it all in because hours ago, I was sitting on the floor laughing with my friends until our exhausted bodies found a comfortable couch to sit comfortably on; our time was getting shorter and we were trying to fit all our stories up to the last minutes before goodbye although we knew it wasn’t possible. Weeks before that, I kept thinking, shit. December is perhaps like this, a repeated hello with my anticipation tied on its end.
I let the silence linger for a while. The kind of silence when after the door is closed nobody welcomes you home. The curtains are not yet drawn, there are no dishes in the sink. You crawl into a warm bed and wrap yourself in an unmade blanket thinking it was exactly as you left it but you have somehow been changed by the day. Even here, December forgot about its coldness. From time to time, I check to see if I can feel it finally when I open the windows but undeniably it has lost its chilling quality. An entire year has elapsed and I think about how easily something is lost. It makes me question how much we mean anything, how much something means to us, and what is worth holding on to, not because I no longer want to hold on too much to anything any longer, but because I’m not sure in certain things if I still should. Everything seems to dissolve in an instant the way I already half-expect they would. A thought that passes through my mind while sipping my cup of tea flashes swiftly and then is gone quicker than the remains of my cup. You no longer remember what you told me, so what does it mean to you? I’m afraid someday I might forget it too, and where does it all go?
An entire year is a long time, I don’t think I can delude myself into thinking I still recognize myself in front of a mirror. But then maybe it’s not that much different. This month last year I was talking about the impossibility of change without the inevitability of loss, a cycle ad infinitum. I’ve been trying to find the words for what I’ve been feeling lately. Each time I go home and each night before going to sleep there is an outpouring I feel is much needed but cannot escape. Like when I’m taking out my bedclothes suddenly my evening routine feels like the hardest task of the night. I’d seek the words of others trying to find a clue. And even as I’m writing this it’s still here arresting my heart. I was trying to force it to come out but maybe the reason it doesn’t is because I’m still living it. I’m still trying to understand. And maybe it’s okay, to have something nagging at my heart and have no words for it. To live in this ache of not knowing what’s coming next, not knowing what it is I’m aching for, not knowing how to get it out of my chest, and if the change—all of it—is indeed palpable or only a product of my overthinking. Maybe it’s a story that if burdened by the weight of telling is over. Maybe it’s a story I don’t want to be over.
But I want to focus on the changes that are good and the losses that are necessary, like a metamorphosis. Yes, caterpillars becoming butterflies, but I think about the chrysalis. The transitional state. The part where there is no caterpillar, no butterfly, no half and half, only a hardened outer body for something so delicately liquefied inside. I think about how romantic it sounds but in reality, the process is lonely and almost entirely macabre. Self-digestion. Dissolution. Decay. They know what they have to become and what it takes to get there, and they probably don’t forget as some studies suggest. Caterpillars don’t have much of a choice. As humans, though, we have the capability to accept the past or deny them.
Last year was my undoing and this year I just wanted to forgive my past. To put the rage to rest. To cast the blame aside. To lay my weariness down. I don’t know if that’s permanently possible—if there won’t be any more tomorrows where I would wake up feeling it all over again, but perhaps I will hold on to this year for a while for it has brought so much kindness into my life. The year I couldn’t imagine moving to from the preceding year but here I am anyway, still not past the anger but perhaps past the rage. So much suffering made room for goodness, and that is what this year is, like the hands on my back when the world was a vacuum I was trying to breathe through. I can attest to the times I didn’t think I could make it, the times I wondered if I still wanted to, but I learned to view my inadequacies and incapabilities as not things to punish myself over but as a reminder that I am not meant to be perfect. That what I have to be working on is a continuous arrival at the core of myself. I don’t have it all, I don’t know everything. I am still that child who amuses herself of some silly thing, who dances around like a jellyfish and looks to see if everybody’s laughing or at least smiling, and thinks it matters just as much. A lot of times this year it felt like a miracle to laugh. Soon enough I was laughing even at my lows, even at the bad parts, even at myself, even if it was pure sarcasm. I no longer want to change anything, I want to accept them as they are.
Like a caterpillar, I have been hardened. Like a caterpillar, I have been softened. I don’t mind if I will ever be my own kind of butterfly. I will keep shedding skin. I will keep trying to grow wings. I will lose what I have to lose and keep what I have to keep. I will hold on to what also doesn’t want to let go of my hands. Never mind the world if it has to be what it has to be, I want to be more accepting.
I want compassion to teach me how to forgive.
Still, I did make it somehow, didn’t I? These days, when I go outside sometimes I still can’t believe my body for being receptive once again to the overstimulation of the lively world. It is freeing. I am enjoying loud music again, even the noise, even car rides. And through crowded buildings and busy streets, through fireworks and rivers and a room full of unfamiliar people, through all of your voices I’m loving even more, when the heat breaks or the cold sets in, I thank the miracle of breath. I have come to believe that the little things are actually the big things, and the seemingly big things are nothing but a door that opens up for us, and for the little things bound to show up at our doorstep. It is up to us to notice them, and this year taught me a lot about when you pay attention to the little things that’s how kindness becomes so tangible it moves you. So moving there is nothing else but to reciprocate.
There was a time when my mind could barely think of anything and my words could barely make a sound, and now there is nothing else to say other than I’m grateful. For the birth of this space where I can be sensitive without fear, for its growth and continued existence. This space was born out of something so terrible; life is like that. I’m grateful for the books I’ve read and the authors who wrote them, for the book community where I get to celebrate people from afar. I am grateful for being able to complain to my friends about our limited time because I get to tell them I complain because I care. I am grateful for the time no matter how limited, for patience, for consistency, for my senses, for generosity, for noticing, for remembering, for actions, for words, for therapists, for music, for breath, for air. And for all that comes with the year passed with a faithful God and the people who have been here. For so much. I want to tell you if we’re in the same place it doesn’t matter where we go. Because wherever you are is a beautiful place to be in, and wherever we will be is a new memory to remember and to be afraid of forgetting. I know there is a lot to mention, so much has been said and so much still hasn’t, but this is what I want to remember most, and probably what I’d hold on to for as long as I could: the compassion of so many people that made this year not just a mere getting through, which is hard enough, but also a living through, which is harder. And I am glad to have lived through it.
🤍🕊️