Flimsy

I have failed you, friend (and in that one sentence, hold the complexities of the interpersonal convergence of accountability; most notably, we have no agreements for me to fail and yet.) And yet.

If we do not name these things, the weaves and threads that tangle ever moreso, does that somehow make them less real? Less complex? We both (we all) know the answer (no- the answer), and yet, we do not name them still because they have not made words, created rhythm and timbre and pitch and sound to encompass what we hold here.

I feel flimsy, thin parchment paper unprepared for the heavy windfall of words. Sluggish. I can’t keep up (and it is the first I have known this so poignantly; I can feel it in the way my words come up short and crumble, unaccustomed to working in the ways they are meant to work).

Because I have not been thinking. The luxury of reprieve is still a failure to do, and while I do not think that failure is bad, I sit in the same questions I asked months ago and have no further answers now than I did then because I have exercised no effort and wonder why I am still hip-deep in the murky unknown.

You make the necessary look easier than it feels, and even if I know in my heart that there is nothing easy here, I envy the swiftness of action (having never seen the agonizing course of contemplation). I can’t give you flippant answers and yet, they are all I have, so there are questions you have posed that I still cannot answer and I see the way the world has shifted, reminding me of promises I made. Bookmarks held in the places of my life that I am being asked to return to when I said I would and I don’t want to because it is the hardest thing I have ever done.

You did, and I hated you for it because you made it possible, made it real. You gave me permission, long ago, and yet I want it from places I will never get it.

How dare we want consent in these intricate, complicated spaces?

We are still human, after all.

Loving you has never been gentle but it has always been easy and I find myself measuring the gap in space between where I am and the amount of vulnerability necessary to show up in the ways I want to. I am out of practice of being so honest.

And so failure is, in and of itself, a complicated measure of relationship. It is not a quantification of good or bad, only a note in the margins of capacity and potential. We both know I am, and can be, and will again be more than this. In someone else, this might be enlightenment, but in me, it is stagnation and the consequence of taking time away from effort because I convinced myself of the lie that it was too hard.

That is its own oversimplification, as much as the language of cowardice.

You are a raised question and.

A bookmark and.

Permission and.

Complexity, the kind I thrive in and have lost the trick of because (if I had the answer to that, it would be wrong too) and.

Hope, the kind that leaves you clinging with fingernails bleeding because maybe… maybe.

And to fruition, it’s worth it, and to failure, cements it all the more complete.

And what is failure but the lack of being what could be, and what could be, the myriad of paths that lay forward, you remind me again of what is desired, what is needful. The shape and form of harm and how we hold it with our bodies thrown over grenades, minimize the blast radius and put the pieces back together on the other side.

You showed up, and in existing, remind me of something I have never named but always known, a mark and measure of movement and the ways in which I have allowed motivation to paralyze me.

And so I failed to move. Which is to say, you found me where you left me, which is neither good nor bad, but a reminder. A bruised heart, calmer for the catalyst, quieter in catharsis, but still bruised and tender nonetheless.

Never stop being, selfishly, because your being moves at a tempo I breathe and I have been holding (this breath) still for far too long.