“You seem happier.”
“Do I?” Looks down, askew, the chipped polish on my split nails.
Nods. Genuine and unassuming.
“In all the years I’ve known you.” A number that requires a second hand to count.
I remember we were at the wooden table and my chair had an uneven leg (set me slanted from the moment I sat down). I don’t remember how we got there, but I suppose we were always having conversations about the best and worst of times. We had easily exhausted all other discursive topics; the only thing left was happiness.
I do not have a compass to tell me if it were true, true north. Would I know the honesty of it, even if it had held me down and opened my eyes and pierced through me like a self-healing wound? That question knots in me like a foregone scar. I traverse it again and again; the seasons change and I pass through those currents of change, and I imagine the lilt in my laugh recognizes it too.
There are no inquiries about unhappiness. An assumed state, almost. Relish the discontent and dissatisfaction and dissociation on my face. A relief of familiar feeling: picked open, picked over.
I locked myself in the bathroom after and cried. Snot and salt. Waterworks. I was porous. Everything had been made to pour out of me. Spilled my guts out on the linoleum and braced my forehead against the porcelain.
“Do you know what’s changed?”
Name the things, count them off. Study and see if they are readily replicable elsewhere. The ease of sunlight slanting through the windowpanes; the gentle green hill looming above a dusky skyline; the reality at which everything seems to move quicker and collide to a perfect kineticism beyond itself, fiercely tangible. Freedom nipped at my heels and dared me to say something.
“No.” Lie like an elision.
I could sense the radiance the last time, hoarded under my skin and emitted outward. A frenetic hum that recalled how well I knew myself, how completely I had solved the world. I stood in the doorway and leaned against the mottled concrete wall. I had this theory. Theory, truth, I knew it all to be the same. I told you and you didn’t ask questions. Accepted posturing as postulates.
I needed this to make sense. I had packed up the strays of my being into this shoebox of sorted labels. I could not make myself suffer humiliation a second time.
Imagine, I say this instead. “Some days, that is all I feel.” A swell, line and sinker.
Or this. “I know. I can’t believe it either.” Disbelief; not relief.
Imagine I say nothing.
This is the wreck of being alive, I think. I’ve been pulled to shore and left adrift at sea more times than I care to count. Set asunder.
Ask of the world, quietly, could you hold me without hurting me? Let me fall lightly, gracefully—cradle me after collapse?
But there isn’t enough softness, solace (never enough) to pad this heaviness; our knees are skinned and knuckles are scraped, and there’s this looming ache in the third disc from the last time we weren’t sure whether we’d be up again. I’m up early this morning, couldn’t sleep.