"Truly, with hardship comes relief." (94:6)
Part 1: Me
Why do we appreciate difficulty in fiction but not in people, in life? The romance of struggle looks good on the page, but the experience of it is unbearable. The ability to face difficulty is a moral question: it deals with obligation, with patience, with suffering. Struggling is a discipline, it is disfiguring, it transforms. It demolishes just as much as it creates. And it exists on many planes: there are struggles of the mind, struggles of the body, struggles of the "system" and the universe, those that are implanted with very little warning and without the consent of the struggler.
I am, and have been for my entire life, a person of the mind: most of my time has been lived internally, with no physical evidence, extrinsic validation, record of existence. Some of it is dreaming, or fantasy, born of the desire to have something of my own, that follows my rules and isn't subject to the shocks of the real world. A lot of it is fear: an avoidance of the possibility of failure, of unsavory outcomes, of embarrassment. The majority of my life has been spent just thinking: productive contemplation, yes, but also about all of the ways my life could go wrong. My overactive mind creates a paralysis in my body, eschewing risk for the illusion of comfort, creating a life without roots, a life that melts into air.
Bad things happen to me in my compulsive evasion of them. Through my pathological terror of consequence, I shield myself from the experience of difficulty. God intervenes: it is only when I have to reckon with my own avoidance that I grow, and become closer to who I really want to be. In order for me to be more free in my life, these things happen so that I am forced out of the smooth prison of my own imagination and shot into the real world.
I am more scared than I realize, and more fragile, and breakable. I thought that I knew myself, but I'm realizing that I've just been doing a lot of intellectualizing. The heart suffocates when it is choked by the brain. I'd always wanted to be soft, to be a warm person, more likable: I will always admit to rigidity but was never able to acknowledge the tendency to shatter that always comes along with hardness. I want to have confidence in myself, and I feel like I need these difficulties to remind me of my own abilities, to remind me of forgiveness: that I can be forgiven, that I can forgive. That I can be humble, brave, resilient.
Part 2: You
I think a lot about the role that trust has played in my life since meeting you. I've had to reckon with trust in a way I never have before-- trust in myself, in my life, in the people around me. Do you trust me? It's been much harder than I thought it would be to trust you. It's hard to accept that you love me, too. In the same way I think these bad things happen to me so that I learn to trust myself, I've had this nagging thought that maybe I need all of these accidents and horrors to trust in us. I wish that your words could be enough, but real life is different than letters and broken clocks. I hope that you'll forgive me.
This is part of it, too: the world between us has its own rules of time and space, its own mechanics and scientific laws and governing bodies. So much so that our confrontations with the outside world have been violent, like we have to fight our way through an army after being awoken in a daze from our shared reverie. Through these trials we are creating the places to fall that we never knew we had (within one another, outside of ourselves). Instead of being mortally terrified of plummeting, or thinking I have to catch myself, I'm finding there are other ways.
There is a concreteness to these problems that are arising, in opposition to the made-up obstacles of our minds, the dilemmas concocted in our heads that chase us around like unwitting subjects. These are the things that keep us in the waiting game: the attacks from the universe give us something real to contend with, they force us into action, take us out of our brains. Otherwise, where would we be?
When something stressful happens, people like to proclaim, "Well that just took a week off my life!" But what I'm noticing is that time stretches between the two of us-- not in actuality but in our experience of it. It expands into something malleable, something that we can mold and shape and rest in. Sometimes a week can hold within it the experiences of a lifetime, and sometimes it seems as though nothing happens at all. We're being impelled to make everyday into something new, into something that means something, something real.
Part 3: Us
It always seems that destruction comes much faster than construction. It can happen more swiftly, without intention. To build requires effort, resolution, commitment to see through. Specifically, to build something meant to last, something meant to withstand inclement weather, something for the future, something that will not vanish into the ether, something that will not evaporate into a mere memory. Something that leaves a physical mark, a real record of its existence. These are the bricks we are laying, the nuts and bolts we're screwing together, the nails being driven into the walls: that of something real.
All of these miniature disasters, these slight calamities: these will fade. The older I get the more I understand the adage that it is not what happens to you but what you do with these blights that create your life. All of this will pass, and none of this has to mean anything. What will last is the way that we stuck it out, the way that we chose each other. The way we faced it all head-on and opted to banish it to the annals of the past instead of carrying it with us.
What will last is the way we hold each other, the way we rely on one another, the way we glide over these waves with ease and meet each other, always, where the tides break. What will last is all of the little ways our lives have been changed by knowing one another, and the ways that the threads of our lives are slowly being sewn together, piece by piece, with a teeny tiny needle. What will last is the danger, is the remedying of regret and choosing the hard road, the one not just less traveled by but the one completely uncharted. What will last is the fact that we love one another, and all of the ways that we do it. These are the real things.
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