the invisible string
and getting it wrong
if you told me we would be friends eventually
if you told me my heart wouldn’t feel like a rock on my chest eventually,
i wouldn’t have believed you.
but that’s what they always say when you’re crying on some friends couch exclaiming that there is no world in which you will ever not feel this way
and there will always be some wonderful and well intentioned friend who grabs your shoulders and says i promise, believe me, hear me when i say this, it won’t feel like this forever.
usually you think, sure yeah & fuck you.
but then miraculously, one day you’re standing outside of a house show sending risky texts to someone inside and it’s been six months officially and you didn’t send a birthday text last week and you begin to settle in to the idea that yeah you’re right it won’t be this way forever. and it kind of breaks your heart a little bit. to have been so wrong.
but we aren’t friends yet.
yesterday, as i sat on a tree stump at this house show i looked down and there were a handful of perfect white seashells under my feet. the kind that have been following me around lately. showing up in my dreams and my meditations and then literally showing up as tattoos on friends i never noticed before and in old photos and stickers on the back of my computer. i saw them sitting in the dirt under this stump while i listened to this show surrounded by new friends and a few crushes and had the overwhelming feeling that maybe and definitely all of this was for something.
because with you, i would have never found myself perfectly positioned on this stump in this specific house on a night like this one. and i can look up at the people being ushered inside with a little more peace because i know that you will never walk through those doors. that this space is one of my own creation and i was perfectly designed to be here in this moment with these people. even if it felt like falling down an absolute mountain to get here. i sat on my stump, with my seashells, and i soaked in the truth that my life was never supposed to start or end with you and when i felt like it was the start of an end the universe took the opportunity to fuck with my shit.
royaly. but intentionally. and eventually, perfectly
i’ve been thinking a lot lately about this invisible string. how sometimes we can get it so wrong. the perfect thread that pulls us together isn’t always so obvious. maybe you fall for the wrong person just to meet the right one in the wake. or you meet a heartbreak later in life and find out that you were always meant to be best friends. sometimes a relationship refuses to click and then one day it’s different and then it’s easy and it just seems to makes sense.
i love to get it wrong. there is nothing as human as the accident of trying things out. flirting with what could be and flirting with what you know is not possible but wasn’t that fun anyway. wondering and risking and playing around with what if every person i meet could be the love of my life.
and thank god. i love to look at life as if everyone is destined to change me. in fact, distinctly positioned to change me. ridiculously and magically intended to rearrange everything that i thought could be true. like everyone i meet could eventually be the reason a different well intentioned friend is softly patting me on the back offering platitudes that only they believe.
i love to get it wrong. i wouldn’t trade the opportunity to call my friends on a sunday night and relay a stupid text exchange on speaker to a room full of the best people. to have all of them offer feedback and insight and for my stomach to swim and swirl and for life to feel like it could be absolutely anything i want it to be. and also nothing.
and isn’t that mystery the whole entire point?
please give me boldness and brashness. impulsivity. my stomach feels like acid and my eyes are burning but i’d rather be kept up at night writing, than sound asleep perfectly unbothered by an ever boring world.
i don’t think i was ever meant to be bored.
i love to get it wrong. & i have gotten it so wrong. like falling in love with your coworker a week into working at a new job and what feels like destiny eventually turns into something more like nothing but distant friendship and a whole lot of love. and finally three years later you hear your mom talk about that old restaurant job and say that’s where you learned how to eat again. and you realize that the string did not bring you all that way for a silly romance, but instead that string was pulling you towards healing, and a family and the opportunity to get some god damn food in front of your face.
and did we really have to go through all that trouble? but the answer is yes.
sometimes the romance wasn’t the reason for any of it at all. was never the way the string was pulling. the romance was just the collateral damage of some other greater lesson in living in loving in staying upright.
sometimes the string is not the string you think it’s going to be. but i can’t stop following the patterns and looking for the signs. looking for the silver thread that ties you back to me and me back to you. and you can trust me to be the one who will point out the seashells or the way a moment has the same smell as a memory and now i’m wondering which came first or if they were both a dream.
i’m just happy to be here. i’m so happy to be here. trying something out. getting it wrong. trying again. stepping on toes. wondering when it will get easier and then remembering that easier wasn’t so fun anyway.
i must look like a marionette with all these strings. these strings that are keeping me tethered or strung or hoisted or something else to describe what it feels like to be safe and secure but dangling above some pool of possibility. it’s a tide pool. a whirlpool. some miraculous swamp and i can’t stop staring at my reflection and seeing the entire world in the watery sky looking back up at me.
i went to bed last night with this unfinished and antsy.
sure enough at 3am i woke up writing inside of my head. i couldn’t sleep with the words still swimming. i’m sharing it with you in real time and so if i wake up after all this and none of it makes sense well then what a gift for us all to enjoy this midnight experiment.
