Here. My tongue is bound, but my hands at least are unfettered.
I have so many things I’ve wanted to say, but have so rarely given myself the space and patience needed to form even the shape of the word. I’m still learning. Most people, I realise, will always be just there, still learning.
That does not mean I am okay yet, with knowing that I will always arrive later to the reality of it than those ahead of me. Last to flounder up to every seemingly profound truth. But I suppose that in itself is all part of having my own naivety taken apart, limb by fickle limb.
It hurts.
And for all my naivety, I have seen it reflected so plainly in every single eye that has looked upon me. The me that is 23 and getting married and still learning so so much. Sometimes I took it for pity, often for barefaced condescension, annoyance, embarrassment. I get it. I’ve been trying to get to it for as long as I know. I have been obsessed with it for as long as I have known myself.
But this- this lofty figure that I have begun to know, with the loftier name of Adulthood- it stares down on the selfconsciously green and the barelyformed alike with hard & half dead eyes. And all I am is naive to it, to you.
The real naivety was in knowing and carrying for so long the falsehood of my deeprooted belief: that I am whatever others make of me. It is easy to know these things, easy to carry them with you forever, not so easy to turn away from them all the same. But that’s where the real power is.
I don’t know what to look for anymore, but I am sure we’ll find it. It will take my life but He will piece me together again in Love, limb by fickle green limb.
