You will be quiet, but firm.
You will begin to only say what is necessary, and you will stop explaining. Over explaining.
You will take up more space. Occupy the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. Rearrange the closets and clean dust from the bookshelves and wooden window slats and all the places where sadness and stagnancy have stayed too long.
You will notice that you hadn’t noticed before how much of yourself you had been clenching. Your jaw will loosen. Your body is more relaxed. You stop waking up in the middle of the night. When you wake up it is without any sense of dread. You will cook what you want and not share it with anyone.
The life you imagined having for the rest of your life begins to flicker like static at the edge of your knowing, and now what you hadn’t imagined for yourself becomes more than possibility. The perfect home you shared in a life that was meant to consider others begins to feel like it belongs to someone else—sometimes as if it never belonged to you at all. This curation of space and belongings and light and wooden floors is not the right container for you now. You are spilling out at the edges and making a mess. A glorious, smiling, unapologetic and uncontained mess.
The sudden lack of self-censoring, of having to always locate the right language to avoid conflict, the permission to say what you feel as much as you feel it and claim the voices and places and matters that matter to you feels like a euphoric drug. You are not performing for peace. You are not performing for anyone anymore. You are direct and intelligent and informed and you say what you mean.
People you were once close to do not know what to say to you, how to approach you, their sense of you as they understood you is compromised and now you are someone that they do not know. Do not know if they care to know. Others that you kept at a protective distance tentatively approach you now, because that former distance wasn’t something you had created, it was something that was adjacent to you. And now in its place is a welcome instead of a warning.
You have always been comfortable not knowing. In fact some uncertainty is a necessary ingredient for the successful recipe that is you. Right now there is so much uncertainty. Where you will live, with who, what you might do for a living, will you have enough money, what will the rest of your life look and feel like, what stays, what goes. There will be new music and new love and new life and new sorrow—new unwelcome newness, new forms of uncertainty that will make you cry in sorrow at times, and in joy at others.
You will think often of the poem by Derek Walcott, Love After Love. Its words reach for your flesh like a hymn.
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
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