Not for My Survival

I have spent years
trying to become someone
who could make use of suffering.

Not waste it.
Not just be broken by it.
Make something from it.
A voice.
A practice.
A way of being with other people
that might lessen their loneliness.

And I have done that, I think.

People bring me things.
Their grief.
Their fear.
The shame they can barely say aloud.
I know how to sit still for it.
How to hold it without flinching.
How to answer without trying
to erase what is real.

This is not nothing.

But there is a cost
to becoming the one who can bear it.

After a while
you start to believe
that your worth is there,
in endurance,
in usefulness,
in how much sorrow
you can carry elegantly.

You begin to suspect
that rest must be earned.
That love must be earned.
That being seen without offering something in return
is too much to ask.

So even now,
when love comes near,
I feel myself preparing.

To be intelligent.
To be generous.
To be composed.
To be the one who understands.
To be interesting enough, deep enough,
good enough at surviving
to deserve tenderness.

And that is where the trouble is.

Because I do not want to be loved
for surviving.
I do not want to be loved
for being wise about pain.
I do not want to be loved
for turning damage into language
someone else can admire.

I want, though it is hard to admit,
to be loved more simply than that.

For being here.
For being this person.
For the ordinary self
beneath the practiced one.

I know how much I hide
inside thought.

I can make a beautiful sentence
faster than I can tell the truth.
I can explain a wound
before I let anyone see it.
I can turn feeling into insight,
insight into pattern,
pattern into meaning,
and meaning into something almost safe.

But safe is not the same as honest.

There is still in me
a more naked life
I do not easily show.
Not because it is shameful.
Because it has no defenses.
It does not arrive as argument
or art.
It simply says:

this hurt.
I was lonely.
I needed more than I received.
I am still angry.
I am still afraid
that what people love in me
is what I make,
or what I endure,
and not the unadorned fact
of me.

That is the real fear.

Not that I am too much.
That I am only welcome
as long as I am translating myself
into something useful or beautiful.

And yet I know
there is more in me than sorrow made eloquent.

There is anger too.
Not theatrical anger.
Not the kind that enjoys itself.
Something older.
A force that had to go underground
in order for me to live.
A refusal.
A knowledge of what should not have happened.
A part of the self
that did not consent
and has not forgotten.

I have spent years refining grief.
Perhaps now I need
to let the anger speak
without shame.

Not to destroy.
To become whole.

Because softness without force
is only partial truth.
And force without tenderness
becomes another wound.
I want both in the same body.
I want a life
where nothing essential
has to stay hidden.

And yes, I know
I can seem distant.

Depth has that effect.
People hear a bell underwater
and call it far away.
But distance is not always distance.
Sometimes it is only the sound
of someone living where language
has to travel farther to reach the surface.

I am not too much.

I am only someone
who has had to learn
how to remain alive
inside intensity.

And I know now
there must be others
who can hear in that register.
Others who do not want charm alone,
or ease,
or the quick exchange of polished selves,
but the harder gift
of being with another person
without turning away.

So let this be the change.

Not another triumph.
Not another phoenix story.
Not one more beautiful account
of how I rose from something terrible.

Enough of rising.

Let me be here now
without needing to redeem the past
every time I enter a room.

Let me be loved
not as emblem,
not as survivor,
not as the man who made art
from the wreckage,

but as a breathing person,
sometimes wise,
sometimes tired,
sometimes full of light,
sometimes shut down,
sometimes generous,
sometimes afraid,

still worthy of love
before explanation.

That is the prayer, if there is one.

Not to become extraordinary.
Not to be purified by suffering.
Only to arrive
more fully in my own life.

And to be met there.