Maybe this is a more common thing than I realize. After all, why would it ever be necessary to tell a person every major event that's happened to you, especially the bad ones? Other than a spouse (which I do not have), I really don't know in whom I would've confided, and for what reason... except that for having spent a number of years in therapy, you would think I would've spilled all my secrets. That's the place to do it, right?
I spent a good year of therapy sitting almost silently in a leather chair while a short, kind, rotund man talked to me, at me, past me, and I don't say that as a criticism, because I could not speak, and I didn't know why, but the terror seized up in my throat and all I could do was listen and exist in a space where it would be okay for me to speak if I could. And what is a well-meaning therapist to do with a client who won't speak? Sometimes I wonder what he thought, if it ever drove him nuts as I sat there nodding and sometimes eeking out a few words and flinching at the sound of my own voice in that close, cluttered office. I wonder if he understood my silence better than I did, if he understood that he was up against years of "home training," as it's called, in telling-as-sin; I wonder if he understood that the sound of my voice in the air was dangerous, that darkness hovered in that room with me, tumbled over itself like eager stormclouds, to strike me dead if the truth hung in the air too long.
________
I think I might be done with all that now. Older, more lived, perhaps more tired, more realistic, and less afraid. All good things. And I wish I could tell you my stories, unfurl them like a dusty attic quilt, trace the stories of each square to you with a fingertip that no longer trembles.
I wish I could tell you, without feeling the need to fumble around with I'm not trying to be dramatic please believe me please just stand here with me about how the only real word for the traumas of my life is deaths, because after each one, the person I'd been simply could not continue to be; I wish I could tell you how I became a different person after each, whether by will or circumstance, and I buried their corpses deep. How I am only just grieving all of my deaths now, reverently, carefully, silently carrying them toward home, and how I need you to bear witness, and how I am thankful that you do.
I wish I could articulate the ways in which the truth of my deaths informs the fetal faith in me
I wish I had words for trust; I don't. I wish I could articulate the struggle of responsibility and blame and wronged and self-wronged; I can't. I wish I knew if I were being one of those people who drift toward death with all the deaths they've suffered still bitter in their throats; sometimes, I wonder. I wish so many things were not such blistered sacred space; I wish I weren't still so terrified of so many answers to so many questions I'm afraid to ask.
But I wish I could tell you about how the Truth flows, and that these questions are alive if unformed; I wish I could tell you about the burdens that hang heavy around my neck, and the ways in which I know I am meant to speak, and although I feel so very far away from the otherworldy and powerful grace to which I know I'm called as a writer, I wish I could tell you how enchanted is the writer in me, that the Truth is alive in me, and it flows from my lips and fingers in a momentum I couldn't curb or rearrange if I tried, and that, for the first time in my life, when I sit down to write, I am chasing after the Truth to where it leads, and I know that this is what I was made to do (and, you know, I'm sorry that it probably doesn't always make sense to people who are lucky enough to live outside of my own head; you should read the stuff I DON'T share. ha).
I wish I could tell you these things, because the only way I can tell you of how they no longer threaten to devour me is to tell you what they are; I wish I were in such company that I could bestow on myself the gift of sharing not as expository or as absolution, without hating my own need, but as benevolent and forward in being known.
There's more, too. But there is an enormous flea bite on the sole of my foot, and I wish I could tell you how it's seriously derailing my Truth-train (omg so bad, it's embarrassing; I'm totally leaving it there) and ruining my night.
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