Safe Distance
It is October. I’m sitting in a café on campus, the one right next to the forest. The leaves glow yellow and cling halfheartedly to branches, letting go in a flurry of movement with each breath of wind. We are in the thick of fall now, not many weeks left until winter. It has been a struggle to write for months. When I think about sharing, I imagine that everyone will see me differently, in a bad way. I feel stuck on my own vulnerability and look for it obsessively in others. What do they experience that I don’t know? What do they fight about, cry about, moments before I see them, before they pull themselves together? It gives me secret pleasure to know who is having hard times. Perhaps it is relief. I write and delete; I write and restart. I want to share. But it’s like laying down on a chopping board and bracing for the knife. I prepare myself for the worst, forgetting that there is another alternative, many other alternatives, that do not involve any violence at all. I am afrai...