no shame november

I was crawling on the edges and hiding in the curtains for so long, and I was laughing. It’s impossible to classify how many different kinds of laughter there are, but there is laughter you mean and laughter you don’t. Laughter you feel and laughter you can’t. On my twentieth birthday I laughed as hard as you should laugh on that day. Two decades worth of yelling and screaming, growing and running, feeling and tears. Laying on my stomach on white hotel sheets, two states from home, laughing like I was happy. Like I had ever been happy.

Nothing blocks out light like hotel curtains, so it didn’t matter if I was smiling or crying in the dark. I had been here so many times before, but this time all I could feel was deepness in my heart, a sinking in my adolescent bones. Going through these motions that used to bring me more joy, a carousel of happy memories spinning so fast behind my closed eyelids that I wished the floor would just open up and swallow me whole so I could get away from the spin. Sadness came when I wasn’t looking and took away the feeling behind laughter for good. It snuck in when I was busy drying my eyes and watching everything that mattered to me literally cease to exist and everything that was left pack up the suitcases and head east, leaving me with nothing but the memory of tail lights and a broken heart.

And lying on that hotel bed, I thought, this is it. This is what my life has come to. It was one of those moments where you think to yourself that this is bad, and if you’re thinking that, you know it has to be bad. There was no solution, just keep going.

That was the low, but it was also the calm before the storm. The storm of happiness. The storm of growth. The storm of love. I found someone who made me whole, who fixed the cracks in my heart, and stimulated my brain into happiness. People who made me wonder how on earth I’d ever felt that empty, that scared, that completely alone. There was more joy and feeling behind my laughter than I’d ever known possible. I felt fixed and I felt healed and I felt whole. Instead of wondering what I was missing, I wondered how I had gotten so lucky. Things I wanted to happen started happening, and the concept was so foreign that I felt like it wasn’t possible. Floating in a sea of blue eyes, smiles, and glances, of shared ideas and shared moments, and way more than one too many coincidences.

I never believed in fate before, and I shouldn’t have wanted to after I met you. This is love, but some people call it fooling yourself, and it was introduced to me by you. I shook its hand, but nothing further. You touched my hand, but nothing more. I let you touch my heart, but that’s on me, not you. Apparently those fireworks in the sky are for my eyes only, or you were just hiding your eyes. Call it destiny, fate, old-fashioned coincidence, or look up a study pertaining to why human beings make something out of nothing, but the day came when I saw your tail lights too. I want to believe that because they were heading west and so were we in relation to the sun, there is hope, but I know it’s one-sided.

The funny thing about healing is that it comes from within our own, singular minds. We may think we need other people to save us, but I know now that’s all just smoke and mirrors. We believe what we feel to be true. But truth has no interest in making us feel whole. Truth takes us and breaks us, fragments our hearts, destructs the careful realities we have constructed in our minds to make us happy. Your thoughts can save you but your thoughts can kill you. Your thoughts can save you and your thoughts can kill you. Truth and belief are no friend of each other when we’re talking about piece of mind. Believe what you can while you can, because here I am again, twenty-two, lying in bed, and I haven’t laughed in months.

We don’t need other people to make us feel whole, but we believe that we need other people to make us feel whole. And that’s the human difference.

(h. bird)