buoy

September 17th, 2021

I was trying to describe how it can feel to open up to someone tonight and it felt oddly comforting to find the words and say them.

It was about why someone who is hurting may not reach out to another person who is hurting, too, but might rather seek to speak to someone who appears to be doing well at the moment.

When you’re drowning, you look for a person in a boat. The fear of pulling down another human in the water with you can be worse than the feeling of drowning alone.

Yesterday marked a year from the night I got the phone call that something was wrong with my mom. We had exactly a month from that day with her left.

I construct boats out of words. No matter what situation I find myself in, I put together planks made of adjectives and verbs and made-up sounds and I appear to be standing above the water, when in reality I swim like anybody else, I tread, and sometimes I fall below the surface.

We live in a time where nearly everybody seems to be hurting, to be potentially drowning, and it’s hard to find a boat.

But I have to say, there are buoys here in the water. There are moments between the treading when we can catch our breath, when we can hold on to something on our level, when we can share stories with each other and find ways to relate and remind one another that we’re not alone.

We can point to lighthouses on horizons that we’ve visited before. We can lay on our backs and remind ourselves that both clouds and stars still exist and are infinite. We can tell tales that inspired joy while they lived and have since become legend.

This is just a person in the water letting all the other people in the water know that it’s okay. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in here. Your next breath is a second away and if you need a buoy, I have space for all of you waiting around mine.