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he came to the counter. i sneezed once, twice.
i think i'm allergic to you.
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you asked me to run at the front of the pack. i didn't want to obey. you stepped toward me, lowered your voice. set the pace, you said. it's you who sets the pace.
so i ran.
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the thing about setting the pace is that your job isn't to run faster or further than anyone else. you don't get to be spectacular in your loneliness. you run in front of everyone, but at a pace they can match. the point is to keep them close, at your hip. the point is to share breath. the point is to take the brunt of the wind in your face. to manage resistance and make a way. to protect them. to go first. to give them something to strive for without being unattainable. to forge, and remain reachable.
i think that's much more difficult than racing ahead.
much more difficult, by far.
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what if it is not my lot to be spectacularly lonely?
what if it is my job to lead, but keep those who follow close?
to mentor...not to exorbitantly exceed?
i'd like to think i'm so unbelievably extraordinary that i'm not capable of taking the hands of others and showing them how to do better and be better. there's less responsibility in being a shooting star. then it's just you streaking nebulae across the sky, so beautiful and fleeting you go unseen and untouched by most. but to glimmer steadfastly amongst clusters of stars, sometimes outshone by neighboring bodies...that seems like a sacrifice. that seems noble.
i don't want to submit to that because it feels noble and martyr-like and it feeds my isolation complex. i want to firmly grasp my purpose because it's the right thing for me. i also don't want to over-reach. i don't need to do the most extreme awe-inspiring things because i see other people succeeding at them, and i don't need to feel like a sloth or a loser because i don't entertain unrealistic notions.
we're taught to dream shatteringly big dreams and crack our bootstraps like whips.
but what if some of us are meant to live simple and ordinary days?
what if, for some of us, brilliance is woven through normal and sometimes tedious lives?
i have so many questions.
i hardly know what to do.
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i make myself cry with the dizzying force of my unknowing, my wondering.
it feels too big for me.
i shrink into my ordinariness. i can't figure it all out.
i send overwrought emails to friends and then bite my lip, wishing i hadn't.
but in the rhythms of the songs in my headphones, i hear all will be well and all will be well, sometimes with quiet building intensity, sometimes with relentless drive, sometimes in the silence, in the fermatas.
times to surface
times to dive
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i've never felt like less of a freak than when you wrote: you most likely feel like a freak because...
because you get it. you really get it. more than anyone.
i can explain it (and i do, chronically), but you get it before the sentences have poured out.
i can ask (and i do, repeatedly), and sometimes you answer and sometimes you ask right back.
i think it's safe to say no one in the world can dialogue with me the same way.
there's no one who can say i'm lovely while truly understanding what it means to say such a thing, while truly understanding what such a thing means to me.
oh, i am thankful.
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i'm in a strange place, bowing under the pull of a gravity i don't recognize.
every day i feel disoriented, keenly aware, reborn.
facing these things in a season of life i always imagined would be full of stability, security, and fulfilled dreams is challenging, discouraging, inspiring.
i am not a finished product. not even close, not even remotely.
i'm more and more unraveled all the time. with every skein that comes off, falling in tangles from my life, more is revealed --- the colors underneath. and that's the part of me that's so startling and mysterious: the inside, what i think of as the very-inside, the glossy cobalt feathers fanned across my soul's ribcage. right now a lot of what i see is indecipherable: figures without faces, shapes without any recognizable angles, characteristics, or geometry.
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so when your letter arrived
(rectangular: a shape i could name)
with just my initials printed across the front
(only people who aren't afraid of me address me that way)
it was like an inside joke
(the best kind)
it was like being embraced
(just as you begin to cry)
it was like being known
(how could you have known?)
it was like a neighboring star
blinking in my direction, kind and unwavering,
saying, i see you. i'm beside you.
you don't have to run
anymore.
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. . . .
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