I have prepared for the wound before the hand was even raised, knowing my place and called it being careful when the honest word for it was always retreating,
I had prepared for the wound before my hand even reached out, the shape of someone who had endured the most unimaginable hardships and was still determined for herself,
How many rooms have I moved through making myself easier to overlook so that the loudest voice in the room would not bother to load up with endless aim,
I have prepared for the wound so thoroughly that I have trouble now finding the original outline of what I was before the shrinking began...
I have felt those words stay in my chest long after the one who delivered them had already moved on to their next audience, and their next opinion, and their next boring afternoon,
I have felt those words arrive in the middle of my own becoming, I stepped aside for them the way you step aside for someone who walks like they already know where they are going,
Why is it always the one voice that cuts that lands the deepest and stays the longest while ten voices that held my work with care barely left a mark on the same skin,
I have felt those words become a part of the way I narrate my own work in the quiet, before I even share it and after and every uncertain in-betweens...
I have furnished my entire interior world and worked with every hopeful thing I own inside, as though living behind those walls was the same thing as exercising good judgment,
I have furnished my entire interior world and spent years telling myself it was there to protect the work when the real thing it was protecting me from the experience of being actually and fully seen,
Is there truly a line between protecting something fragile and slowly starving it of the exposure it needs to know whether it was real or will it ever be real to me,
I have furnished my entire interior world for so long that the people who meant the most never found the door and I never quite brought myself to open it for them...
I have stood at the last possible moment and handed all of my authority over to the loudest and most careless voice available even when that voice was mine,
I have stood at the last possible moment, realizing that I was not ready to be the person standing behind the thing when it was judged,
Would I even allow myself to finally release into the world if the cruelest possible response had already been delivered and I had completely survived it,
I’ve stood on the verge of sharing countless times, but standing alone doesn’t mean holding onto something, that doesn’t mean giving it away, and only one of these actions ever made a difference.
Shrinking before a single word was aimed,
The cut voice always lands deeper and stays,
Architecture built from unfinished opinions,
The wall protected me from being seen,
Standing at the edge until it became the destination...
