Here is a familiar picture: a girl surrounded by people she knows opens her mouth and shuts it again, the way one does with a shoe-box of old things that are precious only to the one who owns them. This is a self-imposed silence that emerges from understanding that a braided string, a misshapen crystal, and a blackened eraser stabbed 23 times have no worldly purpose. But with the profound solitude of loving something that no one else loves comes the lifelong necessity of loving that something enough to make up for the solitude. This is an ultimate truth. But most days it will feel like a burden. This is the other ultimate truth.
Sometimes there is a dull pulse in my ears which speaks of the absurdity of gravity: how all things must eventually fall, like apples, like arrow-shot birds, like people who’ve climbed to the top. It is as much a scientific fact as it is a personal doomsday clock (in fact there is a good deal of overlap between the two). But when you bear the responsibility of loving something, you cannot particularly afford to fall. It’s about pride. Or maybe pride is the bandaid-word for shame. Either way, your eraser parodies of Roman dictators are still waiting for you to come home, so come home you must.
But yes, some days, you will not want to come home. For instance, the day you come to the realisation that you exist purely as a convenient concept to most people you know is possibly crushing, depending on the person who inadvertently induces this realisation. Doomsday science pulls you back down to Earth—after years of believing that you’re more than just a figment of other people’s imaginations, your feet finally touch the ground. There is soil caught uncomfortably between your toes. Most people will never know this. In fact, you understand now that most people probably forget you even have toes.
I really believe now that to him, I’ll always be 17 years old, bright in useless ways and clumsy with my mouth and heart and hands. Forgiving to a fault, laughably predictable, and always, always beneath him. And I believe now that to them, I’ll always be a female option before I am my own person. It will never matter to them what I like to read or what keeps me awake at night or what that idiotic crystal meant to me when I was ten. And I believe now that to them, I am just an accommodating, one-dimensional idea attached to a four-syllable word.
They don’t tell you how hard it is to resist throwing out the whole goddamned shoe-box. But you know you’d regret it. Sure, it’s terribly old and it’s kind of musty and useless, but it’s yours. Even if no one gives it a second glance, even if they throw it down and step on it and spit on it, it’s yours. It hurts when they don’t see you as a person. But I am not an idiot who opens her shoe-box to people who don’t want to understand a thing. Closing my mouth is an act of pride, not shame. Precious things should be kept safe for those who love them, and to hell with those that don’t. This is my favourite ultimate truth.
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