it turns out
It-- anxiety, that is-- comes in form of a virus (as I've said before). I leave an archive, here, at least. And each day: a beast runs its course, ravaging anything it sees. It so happens that it runs its course through my life, breaking, breaking, breaking the glass. And its remnants are like callouses, leaving cigarette marks on my skin, or perhaps words. To be affected is to be aligned with mis-expectations; to be broken is to align oneself purposefully with them. To disclose a bit more: I am who my twelve-year-old self would love to be. But I realize sometimes that I am nothing like what my mother envisioned me to be. I disappoint, and I am an angry disappointment.
So to carry that burden is difficult. To over-articulate in traffic. To say words that I (don't) regret. But still, I am loved-- maybe not by who would have loved a projection of me, a constant, ever-blurring hologram. An ever-eroding rock to some, a gathering of sediment to others. Either way, I, as well as others, are allowed to experience myself as I fully am now, but I am the only one in the world who can experience myself as I was before. And I know she (my mother) doesn't know that, because she doesn't know me, at all. It is, really, just for lack of trying (I'd really love to add an idiomatic "not" at the beginning of that sentence).
It turns out all I needed was someone to treat me like a princess again, treat me like I'm beautiful. Not just a daughter in a house, or a student in a school, a violinist on a stage, a woman in a family. Teach me that I don't have to be the strongest, that I don't have to play the role assigned to me by the stage. Not just to be a member of the carousel, but to be the spectacle that rests happily on the bench. To be loved is to remember what it feels like to be alive. Not that I wasn't alive before: I was living, and still, today, I live. But to feel it is a different thing. For me, it was a sunrise.