My evenings lying in bed send me memories like an old carousel slide projector. I hear conversations reminiscent of a radio drama. Only to be smothered by the darkness and silence of sleep.
-
It kills me to hold this. To hope, to imagine, despite the end having passed. I feel like I am standing before a monument cast in bronze but now showing only the patina that it wears to protect itself.
I speak to something that used to have a voice. I tell it that it is still the home I remember, while it looks back with a silence and stillness I cannot breach. I wait for it to move, to recognize me, but it is set there by circumstances in and out of its control.
So deeply do I wish to embrace it, to cup its face and wipe the patina away to reveal the richness and depth of the bronze beneath. That is my fantasy, my imagined experience. But, all I can truly do is write this epigraph.
You had a different, solitary experience. I know you felt underwater. That, as you fell deeper and deeper into that ocean of expectations and the pressures of things you couldn't meet, the weight kept building. There was only one escape. Only one way to free yourself of the burden of a million tons of thoughts and worries in your head.
I don't blame you. I won't. I will not argue. You did what you needed to do, there was no other way. You protected yourself, and I'm grateful that you did what you could and committed an act of self-compassion.
If there ever comes a day where the water recedes and you want to see who I am without the weight of those expectations, I am easy to find. But if that day never comes, or if you find your peace elsewhere, please know that is okay too. You don't owe me a return.
You need to know though, if you return, you won't find anything except love here. There is no home for anything else. Care, consideration, and kindness are all that I can muster and all that I will ever offer. Even as time dulls the senses and those memories leak from my brain onto the pillow below me as I sleep, the core of it will remain.
Love and the gentle heart, they are one thing.
But please, trust that those are my feelings for you and not an expectation for you to meet. To me it simply, is.
Regardless of your presence.
Apr 24
Apr 24, 2026 at 10:46 PM UTC
My evenings lying in bed send me memories like an old carousel slide projector. I hear conversations reminiscent of a radio drama. Only to be smothered by the darkness and silence of sleep.
-
It kills me to hold this. To hope, to imagine, despite the end having passed. I feel like I am standing before a monument cast in bronze but now showing only the patina that it wears to protect itself.
I speak to something that used to have a voice. I tell it that it is still the home I remember, while it looks back with a silence and stillness I cannot breach. I wait for it to move, to recognize me, but it is set there by circumstances in and out of its control.
So deeply do I wish to embrace it, to cup its face and wipe the patina away to reveal the richness and depth of the bronze beneath. That is my fantasy, my imagined experience. But, all I can truly do is write this epigraph.
You had a different, solitary experience. I know you felt underwater. That, as you fell deeper and deeper into that ocean of expectations and the pressures of things you couldn't meet, the weight kept building. There was only one escape. Only one way to free yourself of the burden of a million tons of thoughts and worries in your head.
I don't blame you. I won't. I will not argue. You did what you needed to do, there was no other way. You protected yourself, and I'm grateful that you did what you could and committed an act of self-compassion.
If there ever comes a day where the water recedes and you want to see who I am without the weight of those expectations, I am easy to find. But if that day never comes, or if you find your peace elsewhere, please know that is okay too. You don't owe me a return.
You need to know though, if you return, you won't find anything except love here. There is no home for anything else. Care, consideration, and kindness are all that I can muster and all that I will ever offer. Even as time dulls the senses and those memories leak from my brain onto the pillow below me as I sleep, the core of it will remain.
Love and the gentle heart, they are one thing.
But please, trust that those are my feelings for you and not an expectation for you to meet. To me it simply, is.
Regardless of your presence.
