Being Scared and Bring Braver,
When we left, we left because the city was shaking its fists at us, much like my step-father shook his fists at my mother. Sometimes I forget about the places where the silence filled up the house, and the nights I didn’t sleep, and sometimes I forget about my shaky legs carrying me down the hallway to face him. People are somehow under the impression that I carry those things around with me in my pockets, wake to and greet them in the morning, but I think grief—sorrow—has a way of hiding itself in the gaps of your bones, and only rearing its head now and then. There are other things hiding there too, you know. Things I don’t talk about, because when you give them words, you give them weight, and they’re already heavy enough on my own shoulders. I do not need to share the weight. I am not afraid of them, but they are unnecessary blemishes on the path behind me. I never claimed I wouldn’t look back. But I am trying to not let the things I see back there falter my steps forward. Because there are a lot of things I could tell you about. Police lights and blood pooled on the carpet and all of our things packed in the back of my mom’s Volkswagen Beetle. I could tell you abotu sliced up arms and digging my friends out of dumpsters at midnight and the time the first boy I ever loved told me to turn around and never look back. There are a lot of things I could tell you about, you know? My dad screaming at me from the top of the hill and crying on the stage that night while everyone watched, and the night I couldn’t find you and I knew it was the last chance to say goodbye. But I don’t think it’s something that I’ve got to do, because those stories are just stories and their effect has already been carried. I am what I am, but there are details there that I am still learning. Like how I’m realizing how there’s something attractive in distance, to me. There’s something harrowing and beautiful about getting in the car and just going. Which is what we did. And, one day, what I think I’ll do. I think, because of the ways that changed me, running as far away from things as possible and holding them at arms length feels right, even if it stifles the way my eyes shine, and the way I am trying, ceaselessly, to bridge all of these gaps and stitch up these miles. It’s not just about love. It’s about owning up to all of the things that I feel, which is something I am bad at. Show me an open door and I will run through it. I’ll hang you up to dry if I think it’ll keep my stuttering lips and shaking hands from making an appearance in the scene.
So the things I’m learning to be brave about? They’re not about the suicides or the hasty goodbyes or leaving a home I thought I knew. They’re not about all of those things that people shoot me sideways glances about. It’s about the feelings I tucked inside my chest and didn’t tell anybody about—not because I was ashamed but because I didn’t think they were relevant. So I’m growing up and still learning, and I’m getting to the place where words are always burning that the tips of my tongue. It feels a little uncomfortable, but how else am I supposed to deal? I’m gonna find a way to let them go. And it’s not brave in a “baring your soul for the world to judge” type way. It’s brave in a “finally becoming comfortable with being who you are and not letting anyone, namely yourself, tell you that there isn’t worth in that.”
There’s a three-by-five card in my wallet that says “become committed to being scared and being braver” and I’m gonna start living by it, or I’m going to be doomed to a life of sidelining myself, and only ever being brave for other people. So I’m showing up here with my heart on my sleeve and a mouthful of things I want to tell you. I hope you’re ready to listen, I hope you’re ready to believe. It’s not a process, it’s not a step-by-step program. It starts the second you want it to, the second you step up, and that second, for me, is right here. Right now.
(jenna fletcher)
