Since I moved to Indiana, life has been small musings between heartbreaks. And this is largely what growing up has been for me. The moving and the wishing people were here that cannot be and the election and the disasters that we become when we are hurt but trying to love people. The war with the self when it comes to deciding what is more important: tending to your own heart or giving that up for the sake of someone else’s.
The desire that only seems to compound with time and people and places. The hard semester of learning but not for learning’s sake, more as a practice of survival. The building of a community of people that feel like a home. Or perhaps the building of a community of a few good people who are home despite the miles between us. The understanding of that, finally. The heartbreak of a friend passing suddenly. And holding my best friend as he cries into the confusion, the keen hurt we were all feeling on that rainy day, and all rainy days thereafter.
The heartbreak of a new year spent among friends just trying to make things feel normal again. The early hours of screaming and yelling and hurting so deeply, everything coming to the surface and boiling over. The realization that this might be the beginning of the end of a relationship built over months of loving each other selfishly. The wishing things were different. The birthday in the snow. The semester spent in busy-ness and not taking the time to feel this current moment over and over again. The hurt of my grandmother passing, and the grief I would quickly carry for months. The resistance to what healing could do because I chose not to go home and see her before she left. How, my mother would tell me, she was holding on to see me one last time. How, I would tell her, I “didn’t have time” and how that was a story I was just telling myself so I did not have to face her not remembering me again. How this kind of small mourning comes with being the favorite; the higher up, the harder of a fall, and mine took the longest. How, if I could go back, I would take the hurt of not being remembered over not being able to say a quiet goodbye.
The summer of breaking—in and up—and the newness of hurting all over again. The loneliness that follows. The bitterness and the arguing. The breaking, the breaking.
The semester of finally feeling like I know what I’m doing and the days of trying to make sense of being alone, what it can serve me, and how I can be okay with the way it sits on my bones, reclined and relaxing into the next day. The feeling of not knowing or understanding myself again and trying to find my way back. The darkness sitting with me like an old friend, changed from their years away spent discovering themselves, too. The thought, “I am here again, what should I make of this?”
The new year spent with friends just trying to make sense of how important a community can be inside of us all. The lack of clarity of how I’m feeling about things. The year of “I suppose” or “I don’t know” or “Maybe” and finding the potential in every possibility, even if it means not making a decision. The January spent with quiet snow, a friend visiting and being broken, a birthday with a surprise cake from the people I spend the most time with. The smile I didn’t know would creep onto my face. How sudden, how fleeting.
The writing. Oh, the writing. How, even when I thought I couldn’t, I found possibilities, explored this current world and the next, thought about the ways a body can move to accommodate new weight. The words stacking on top of each other until I can figure out what to do with all of them. How to sort them. The familiar ache of missing a father who’s face I can barely remember. The breaking again.
The year of feeling bad for carrying so many emotions, often several that conflict. How I’ve been taught as a man to not feel them fully (perhaps at all?) and to just keep going. Keep moving, don’t stop to take your own temperature, you will be fine, suck it up, Robbie, be a man. How that’s never been me. Even if I’ve been silent through this life, my inner world is full of hurting and healing and trying to make sense of everything spinning and sprawling.
The January and February and every month until August spent loving and prepping for letting go again. How distance between me and all the people I love the most will always feel like a series of misunderstandings in my heart. How the miles will never make sense. How the missed phone calls and wishing things were different would dwell on my chest, mounting, piling. But how the vivid rememberings of love and friendship and adventures will stick to my insides for forever. How I am understanding love not simply as an act that one “gets” to participate in, but as a window of continuous light shedding its skin until it no longer curls into a question mark; a privilege I am not always realizing I have in this life until I finally do. Until I finally let it go. Perhaps especially now as I feel very much on the eve of something I cannot see, cannot reach into the dusk to feel, cannot fully remember, and tomorrow will be another day of this, won’t it?
Then leaving.
Then the teaching and the meeting and the learning to love the people I spend the most time with and the people that I’ve loved and then left/they left me/there was always going to be leaving, you know? There was always going to be hurting. I was always going to carry it. I was always going to hope to create a space for others that embraces that which they’ve been running from.
Here I am. Skin and bones, flesh and a heart full of remembering, of forgetting. Sitting here today to see if breaking over and over again can mean there will be something new tomorrow. Hope—a muscle I have not learned to work well—sits at my table now and I am in awe. How, despite a darkness that I’ve known and will never know, hope has a role. How I won’t always get it right and I won’t always make sense and I will always have more questions, even when I have answers, and how I am becoming again. Me again. The world spinning again. And how, when I spend every day in exhaust from learning to love the people around me better, I can turn to myself at the end and whisper “me, too.” and everything might make sense, finally.
R. Francis Williford 