Your words have remained with me not as words, but as a faint pressure—like a hand once placed upon my shoulder and then withdrawn before I could turn to see whose it was. I have tried, again and again, to recall them precisely, to summon not only their meaning but their sound, their weight, the way they must have settled between us. Yet what returns to me is only their shadow: that wherever one goes, whatever one does, pain awaits; and that love, if it exists at all between people, carries pain within it as its quiet companion.
I was seven—I may have been drinking tea with you or reading alongside you—and so I accepted this as one accepts the existence of winter or night—inevitable, distant, not yet my concern. But what troubles me now is not that I failed to understand you then; it is that I understand you too well now, and still cannot live with what you meant.
You told me to remain kind when the heart begins to fracture, as though kindness were a shelter one could step into while everything else collapses. I have tried to do this, faithfully, almost stubbornly, as if obedience alone could make your advice true. Yet kindness does not feel like shelter. It feels like exposure. It opens me, again and again, precisely at the moment I most need to be closed.
You did not say—perhaps you did not know, or perhaps you spared me—that kindness is not harmless. It is not soft in the way a child imagines softness. It is a blade, and not even an honest one: it cuts in two directions at once, without declaring which edge belongs to whom. I have held it carefully, or so I believed, and still I find myself wounded. Worse, I cannot always tell whether the wound was mine to begin with, or whether I have simply mistaken another’s blood for my own.
This is what I cannot forgive you, though I suspect the fault is not yours: you gave me no instruction on how to wield this blade. When does one turn it inward, accepting pain as the price of loving? And when does one turn it outward, refusing that price, even if it means wounding the very person one wishes to protect? There must be a moment—a decisive, almost invisible moment—when one chooses. But I have never recognized it while it was happening. I only ever see it afterward, when the cut has already been made.
And so I ask questions that do not yield answers, only further questions, multiplying like reflections in a mirror. When do I place another before myself, and when do I withdraw, guarding what remains of me? Is there a correct measure, a hidden rule, or is every choice already a mistake in one direction or the other? If I am kind, I suffer; if I am not, I betray something essential. Where, then, is the path that does not demand loss?
Perhaps there is none—or rather, there is one, but it requires a coldness I am not permitted to possess. Perhaps the blade exists only to remind us that there is no bloodless way to remain close to another person.
You see, Grandmother, I have begun to suspect—not with certainty, but with a persistent doubt—that you were not telling me the truth. Or rather, that you told me a truth that was incomplete, and therefore, in its incompleteness, unbearable. You spoke of kindness as though it were salvation, or at least endurance. But what if it is merely another form of suffering, one that disguises itself as virtue so that we accept it without resistance?
I wonder whether you knew this and chose silence, or whether you, too, believed in what you said because you needed to. It would be easier for me if I could decide one way or the other, but I cannot. You remain, even now, indistinct to me—not only in memory, but in intention.
What I do know is this: the kindness you asked me to preserve has not protected me. It has not made love gentler, nor pain more bearable. It has only ensured that I remain exposed to both, without defense, as though that were itself a kind of duty.
And yet, and this is perhaps the most troubling part, I have not been able to abandon it. Even now, writing to you, I feel it working within me, shaping these sentences so that they do not accuse you too sharply, so that they remain, despite everything, careful, almost tender. It is as though the blade refuses to be put down, even by the hand it wounds. It twists itself in the wound it has made, over and over again; you see, even in description, I am forced to be precise about a pain that defies precision.
I continue like this, uncertain and divided, trying to learn what you never taught me, and perhaps what cannot be taught at all: how to hold something that cuts, and to decide, in each moment, where its edge must fall.
If such knowledge exists, it has not yet come to me.
And if it never does, then I will have to conclude that you asked of me something no one could ever fulfill.
