Sometimes I think we convince ourselves that other people understand us, because then when we don't know, we can trust they'll tell us who we are. But the truth is, all we do is guess.
So for a while I didn’t trust people. I wasn’t convinced that anyone understood me. How could they when I never gave them the chance? And then I met a boy and before this gets cliché and I go on to say he changed my life, I fell apart. “We can work this out together,” he used to say to me. “Don’t shut me out,” he’d go on. “Why won’t you let me love you?” And maybe that is cliché. But, I can’t be helpless.
Still I chose him to be one of those people, the sort who could show me who I am when I forgot. So now when I have work to do or questions to answer I can’t give them without wondering what he might say. Because he knows me, or he knows a part of me that I want to exist.
And he has written truths about me that I didn’t just as I have written truths here that may only exist in writing. I tend to be whatever I trust in order to survive. I thought that I could protect who I was by keeping it to myself. I trusted silence and chose to be silent and misunderstood. Yet, I exist in so many ways. I am like an ambiguous word like “I” or “nine” or “love.” Most of the time I hold these existences in abeyance; they are distanced away from the idea of myself that I hold. And I hold on to what I must believe in order to remain myself, in order to be a self.
I am. And that is a complete sentence. I’m real enough, but I don’t want “I am” to just be my sentence. I want to be something. And in order to be something I have to choose what to believe. We just are, until someone puts some order to us and gives us shape and form.
The truth is I am relative. I am an idea. I am guesses.
And right now, I don’t know how to take all those guesses, all those ideas and make them exist together.