let it come.

I was sitting in the backseat of my roommate's SUV; we, between classes, had indulged our Tuesday ritual of tapas and half-price sangria, and they, the two roommates - they wheedled come onnnnn, let's just go to the beach, you've never missed class, you can miss five classes, come on, you know you want to! but no, I always said, no, listen, I left my whole life for school; I'd done the math and really, it's like throwing away X number of car payments just to sit in wet sand and chug vodka until the nighttime ocean feels welcoming, and they'd roll their eyes and crack jokes about backseat poetry readings, god, ugh and shake their heads and we'd wobble tipsily,grudgingly, to our baking & pastry class.

But this time - come onnnn, Lisa. Lisa. Come ON - I sighed, shook my head, all the requisite putting-up-of-fight - I can't, guys, I said, because I had to.  And I looked out the car window, and the clouds were glowing pink, purple, peach, the colors that turn the light golden and seem to ache in the sky as they deepen.

The roommate behind the wheel - we met eyes in the rearview mirror. She grinned, and swerved last-minute for the exit marked beach. And I closed my eyes to the sky and let it come coursing through me, felt it tingle and ache through my limbs, and I didn't think critically again for the next three years; I was tired. I was done.

____________

I wasn't in my 20s when I skipped my baking & pastry class to get drunk on a nighttime beach. I was 31. Spontaneous, maybe impulsive to the people who'd known me the previous ten years, here, I found myself The Stickler; The Responsible One; The Dorky Intellectual One, But Mostly Affectionately So. It was as ill-fitting as any identity I'd tried on without realizing that's what I was doing. It was uncomfortable, but I couldn't pinpoint why, in the same way I couldn't ever pinpoint why I'd always felt as though my presence in the lives around me was fraudulent.

So I sat on the beach and drank to killing the parts of me which had brought me here.

It didn't work.

It just brought her to the surface.

And it blows my mind, to remember 20-Something Me - makes me shake my head and whisper man oh man to myself. Blows my mind, because twenty-something-year-old me - that is one. tough. bitch. To have worked so hard and never let herself know how exhausted she was - I can't help but admire it just a little. I can't help but chuckle that, for me, such hard work is performed best in youth, when there's energy to accomplish it.

Mostly, though, I grieve for her.

I grieve for the darkness through which she saw every single thing in her life.

I grieve how little she understood, how hard she worked at graduating from one survival mode to another, and another, and another - adapting and observing, the exhaustion of changing colors to fit the wallpaper, without understanding that none of it was the same as identity.

I grieve that her toughness was borne of necessity; I grieve for how thoroughly terrified she was of herself, and every way she worked to Deal With Things Better Than She Was Currently Dealing, always. I grieve for how hard she worked, absent any sense of personal identity, to be Good; how hard she tried to out-scream a mantra of death, death for you, you will die with be good, be good, so you can be better. 

I grieve that, after hiding herself away for so long, and trying to do what she thought was Good, she gave up, because none of it brought change or relief. I grieve because part of her had to know it was futile; part of her had to know that this moment would come, that she would eventually fix her eyes on an aching sky and say, crystalline and succinct: this bullshit is not me, and I am finished with it. I grieve because it needed to be said, but she didn't understand that I am not Good and I am tired of fighting everything I know to be true didn't have to mean fuck goodness, because it is nowhere in me. 

I grieve that I can't forgive her for anything that followed.

But even so.

I grieve through a greater understanding of grace - for those who cannot see, who don't even know their need for ears to hear, whose worlds are so tormented and small, contrived and unstable, built on so much wet sand, forgive them - for those without identity, who work so hard; for those who spend their years afraid of what they could be, both in potential for good and evil; for the struggle to be without being known, or knowing; for eyes afflicted by dark, distorted mirrors of everything good and true -

- for they know not what they do, who they are, where they are, where to go, where You are. 

As hard as I fought everything in me, I never knew how grace waited for me in grief; I never knew grace until I just let it come to where I'd always been.