Once, in a fight, someone I loved told me I was rash.
“I know you,” he said, too quickly that I couldn’t tell whether his tone was accusatory. “I’ve seen how you react to things. I know how rash you can be.”
It wasn’t supposed to hurt me, just slow my temper. But it burned. The simple, pleading evaluation made my throat sting with sharp tears.
He wasn’t wrong, but I wish he had been. I wish my anger would stay hidden and burning in my stomach and my split-second decisions could disguise themselves as calculated.
I want to be much better than I am. I’m rash and reactive and it’s written all over my face. Most mornings, the first thing I do is reach for my phone. (The last two sentences are related!)
In college, I took a theology class that I skipped at least once a week. I was annoyed by the number of questions that it sat me with and I hated the professor’s attendance policy. In the classes I attended, we talked a lot about desire. It eventually brought up a portion about conditional and unconditional love. My short and skinny of the discussion, and that one quote I guess, is as follows: Everyone wants to be known and loved. If you’re loved and not known, it’s an awful loneliness. If you’re known and not loved, it’s a mirrored rejection.
I slept through this binary then and when I come back to it now, I wonder — shouldn’t there be something else? A secret third thing? Is there something we can do besides knowing and loving? There must be a word for the tenderness I feel for strangers in this city. Last week, a man sitting next to me on the train fell asleep and accidentally leaned his head onto my shoulder. I can’t know him or love him. I probably wouldn’t even want to — but he had my shoulder for the ride home. There is a warmth, for me, that goes beyond the knowledge of anyone’s character outside of our interaction. Sometimes I worry that I have more softness for strangers than I do with people that I see every day.
It’s easy for cruel people to create a sliding scale with conditional love or willful ignorance. They love you until they know you, and then it becomes something intimately cold. They know you until they love you, and then they become a shadow stranger with balloon promises and an updated list of intentions.
What I’m saying is that loving and knowing shouldn’t be a meet-in-the-middle kind of deal.
What I’m really saying is that some people don’t know how to love other people without hurting them, and that makes the knowing feel like a curse. Being seen, sometimes, will itch your skin and make you want to change your name or hair. Being naked like that will make you quiet and afraid of giving. The silhouette of your secrets turning into weapons lives behind your eyelids and stretches your shoulders to your ears. I know what it’s like to swallow that soreness.
It’s winter now and I wanted to be able to tell you something different by this point, but I keep running into myself and my sore shoulders. I’m not at a place where I feel like I want to be known and I’m too frozen to be loved like I deserve. So I’m presenting you with my third option, for now —until I can thaw and come back to the party, until we can talk like friends do.
What I know to be true about the character of GOD (Yes, I’m talking about God!) is that He draws near and that you’re supposed to be able to find Him close to you anytime and anywhere. That same theology professor that I just told you about constantly said this thing where she claimed God is “fluent in the language of tears.” I want to cling to this more than anything.
The third thing is closeness. Being fluent in the language of tears, of joy, and memorizing my friends’ work schedules and favorite flowers. Sitting on The Couch and listening to stories, telling strangers old and true things about yourself until you can come up with new ones. I’ll sit with you while we figure it out, and you can lay your head on my shoulder on the subway.
It’s just a temporary fix, of course — but it’s working for me until I can be soft again. Fake it til you make it, and be within reach just in case the knowing and loving slips through the cracks of the castle you’ve built. You can’t be all walls forever, I’ve learned!
When that person I loved called me rash, I wrote down exactly what he’d said so that I could revisit it and piece together why it made my stomach drop so quickly. In the tiny jigsaw puzzle of my evil little heart, I don’t think I had realized that having someone so familiar with my quiet moments and volatile moods would uncover such an embarrassing gift: It’s petrifying to be known and even scarier to be loved. For now, I’ll bide my time with a promise of proximity and a prayer for softness. I hope the same for you!
five things i’ve consumed lately
Every song on this playlist and obviously Stevie Wonder’s short but perfect cover of (They Long To Be) Close To You. Every time winter rolls around, I have to have every version of this song in my ears.
I just finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and immediately started it over again. I made a timelapse of me finishing the book because I felt a good cry coming on and here’s a screenshot from it, if this tells you anything:
I love reading something for the first time and knowing that I’ll think about it forever!
I finally saw Bones and All last week and loooooved it. Ethel Cain, one of my favorite artists, also loved it and immediately wrote a song about it which I haven’t gotten out of my head.
Kaite and I saw Almost Famous on Broadway this weekend. NEED I SAY MORE! My spoiler for you about this show is that they sing River by Joni Mitchell when Penny Lane overdoses. I mean… I leapt to my feet!
The day after Thanksgiving, Lara and I went to Waverly Diner and had hot tea and chicken tenders. They gave us two heaping bowls of barbecue sauce that we didn’t ask for. This felt like the dumbest and best holiday meal I’ve ever had.
You know where to find me, I’ll always be close!
Love,
C
This is absolutely stunning writing, I am always in awe of how your writing makes me feel so strongly
love love love