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 afraid that anything I give can be used as ammunition against me. I look for the opportunity to retaliate. I am a cornered dog. I will bite at any movement, even if it’s a step back. I look for other’s weaknesses to feel less alone.

I experienced the romance of high school and university as an outsider, watching my friends fall in and out of relationships. I didn’t kiss anyone until after I graduated college. I gathered data: reasons why so and so broke up. Red flag, green flag. They’re a ten, but. Never do this. Always do that. I would scroll on social media, analyzing relationship posts, noting when those posts disappeared. I concluded that a relationship was a formula. When my time came, I would be perfect, self-aware. I would not make the same mistakes as everyone else.

I want to stand unguarded. I want my flesh to be soft and yielding, I don’t want to calcify. But each time I try to write about falling in love, the terror and the paralyzing joy, I think of everyone else who has fallen in love and did not tell me they were afraid. 

I look for secrets in others to convince myself that I am normal. I want to know what they are afraid of, I want to know what makes them cry. I have been crying so much lately, this month, this summer, this year. Time feels like one long thread of tears. I stand at the edge of a well and look down into the dark. I look behind me and see places that do not exist. I am unrecognizable to myself one year ago, I cannot imagine myself in any other time. I look into the future and cannot find resolution. I can’t seem to convince myself of an alternative.

When I write in public I worry that people read over my shoulder and laugh at the pretentiousness of what I write. This is what I do, to others. Tell myself that I would not be so naïve. I grasp for control in what is not mine.

When I first entered our relationship, I choked on the disorientation of being unable to predict your actions. I panicked at the smallest steps towards vulnerability. I cried alone, all the time. I could not let go of the façade I built for myself. The relationship formula is baked into me: this plus that equals break up. I looked for violence and so it was all I prepared for, I did not consider that you could be gentle, that I could be deserving of gentleness.

I want to have a house and garden with you. We would grow potatoes and carrots and beans and I’d braid the garlic to hang in the kitchen. We would have chickens in the backyard and a room with all your books. In the evenings we would play music together.

I do not want to be afraid. I want to love without feeling like my actions stack against me. And to do so I must consistently, willingly let my guard down. Closeness cannot be achieved from a safe distance*. I am tender and bruised. I want to change.

* source