A Wandering

The time we spent together was so fun. I haven’t had that much fun in a long time. We laughed, we laughed so hard we cried, we finished each other’s sentences, we had inside jokes. It was carefree, messy, magnetic, addictive.

I listened and was understood in kind. I wasn’t asked too many questions but was carefully, delicately peered into enough to know I was valuable, respectable without any pressure to give up privacy unless I was ready.

After days of this, I wandered. I needed space to be alone while everything I hadn’t thought or felt caught up with me, brought me back to myself. When I caught myself smiling at the jokes we could’ve shared had I wandered un-alone, I gave myself time to reel in my longing for good community. 

I hadn’t fully accepted it yet, but I knew this wouldn’t happen again, so without fully knowing why I needed it, I gave myself grace and freedom to wander without structure, care for efficiency, or ignorance of desire. I became the listening ear, the understanding I wanted.

And when that wasn’t enough, I made space for even less structure, efficiency, rigidity outside of the wandering. Perhaps I was attempting to craft the environment we organically created, but I was less tidy, less rule-bound, less moral. I questioned trivial rules I’d adopted over the years.

I remembered someone asking me once if there was a less organized side to me that no one else saw. My response was, “well, I have to be steady.” At the time, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps I didn’t know the other parts of myself much either. I think I used to, but I’d conditioned myself to believe that was careless, childish, wrong.

Is it really so terrible to be one of the unsteady ones? 

So when I still needed more, I wandered until my feet and mind grew heavy and only wanted rest.

And I’ll keep wandering, keep breaking my own rules until enough time has passed that all that remains is a pleasant memory.

---