Happy Sunday.

How has your weekend been? I’ve spent mine making eccentric drinks at a local coffeeshop, realizing how much I love having fun weekend jobs.

I realized something else this week too.

I was listening to this girl read her poetry in class the other day and she sounded so sad. She sounded like glass breaking. Her eyes looked like they could barely see anything without wanting to drown themselves in pools of salt, pools left over from that summer that they don’t talk about. Pain was bubbling up in the back of her throat and spilling out of the corners of her mouth like water from a pot left unattended. It was the kind of thing that stopped being “moving” pretty quick. It was the sort of thing that touched you in that really bone-chilling kind of way.

DOES IT SCARE YOU?

But that made me realize something. It made me realize that her sadness scared me. And sadness doesn’t scare sad people. No, sadness is like a warm hug promising you serenity. It pulls you in and whispers sweet nothings into your ear until you are so deluded that you can’t tell which way is up and which way is back home. I know this. Or, I used to know this. I realized, sitting there listening to this girl’s heart break, that I maybe don’t know it anymore. Not like I did. These days sadness feels a lot like an old friend that you don’t remember saying goodbye to but haven’t seen in years. You still know their birthday and that they love Wednesday’s and blueberry syrup, you don’t think you will ever forget these things, but you can’t quite recall the last time that you spoke. And even if they were a shitty friend, even if they left you floating on your back in a swimming pool for all of July, you still hold their memory to your heart. Your car seat is still sticky from where they spilled orange cream soda on it on the hottest day of the year and every time you go anywhere, you can almost still taste that sweetness. And you have a feeling that if you ever did get around to unclenching your fists, their name might fall out of one like a flower petal. Like a piece of something that used to be a lot more whole.

BEAUTIFUL LIES

For I carried sadness like flower, like an aesthetic touch to my adolescence. I thought that it made things more beautiful. That’s what it tells you. It invites you in and convinces you to stay. It becomes your home so that you don’t think that you ever want to leave. It begins to feel like the safest place for you. Because happiness? That’s an awfully high place to fall from. The ground felt safer. I remember that. But it was never what scared me. Sadness was like the golden light that fell through the window at four p.m. to break your heart but to look so gorgeous while doing it. It was James Dean leaning in your doorframe with his coat hanging off one hand and a cigarette dancing in the other as he told you he did not love you anymore. Painful, but beautiful. Sadness was poetic like that, always convincing you that it meant something—that it was deep and cool like the clear, blue swimming pools you dove into as a child, back when bodies of water were for defying death, not giving in to it.

A ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS

It was the numbness that scared me. Numbness was a room without flowers. No, numbness was a room without windows, a room with nothing but still, stale air that gave no indication of day or night, yesterday or last year. It was the color beige. It was not pain, it was the absence of it, and that was so much worse. Believe me when I say that that was so much worse. It’s far better to feel something than to feeling nothing at all because without feeling, you can’t quite know for certain that you are alive. If a tree falls down in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. But I wouldn’t have told you that then. And that is scary.

But it wasn’t to me then. And it wasn’t to this girl, reading her poetry. And the fact that that alarmed me, the fact that I felt this urge to help her, to pull her out of a place that I didn’t even realize I had escaped, shook my world that afternoon. I sat there and understood that I was not the sad girl in the room anymore. There were plenty of those all around me, reading words out loud that I maybe could have understood all of those years ago, but that I could not understand on that day. And there was something about that that felt like grief. Someone once told me that you can grieve things that you don’t want back. I don’t wish for sadness back. But I do sometimes wish that I could hold the hand of the girl who was so in love with it, if only to show her that there are better things to hold onto.

LISTEN

I wish I could show every adolescent girl that. Because when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, sadness is a badge of honor that you wear to show the whole world that you are not a carefree child anymore. You wear it to be be taken seriously, even if it does the opposite. I hated that. I hated that people would dismiss my feelings simply because I was young, as if that made me invulnerable to suffering. You’re the most vulnerable when you’re young. You haven’t seen anything through yet. You don’t know how to survive things yet. You don’t have any armor. Everything touches your bare skin.

But anyway. The point is, it’s a strange feeling to find yourself years away from all of that and to realize that you are happy. That you have become one of them. Watching her perform her poems felt like peering into the windows of a house I don’t remember moving out of. But there I stood, in the flower beds with lilacs bleeding under my feet and a whole world dancing around me, calling me to come back to it.

Come back now. That was all a long time ago.

I step back from the window. I unclench my fists. I don’t live there anymore.

JOIN THE FUN

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