When I was fourteen or maybe fifteen, I told a lie.
I told my friends at school that someone I knew had died.
For a few weeks, I revelled in their kindness and the freedom of my tears.
When the truth was discovered, and my lie was exposed,
I was reviled. Left lonely, disgusted with myself.
I swam in a sea of shame, full of self-hatred.
The white-hot lance of that shame lives inside me.
When I remember, my stomach twists into knots, and my toes curl,
My visceral inward cringing from its heat has kept it here.
For a small moment today on my way to work, I see him.
I see the boy not yet a man, the man not then a boy.
I catch a glimpse of him.
Not his outward form but his inmost self.
I feel his desperate need for connection.
I feel his sense of his own strangeness.
I fell his overwhelm in a world moving too quickly for him.
I feel the flailing strive to be known and loved.
Each feeling strikes its chord in me.
I know its music, it scores my steps.
In this moment, my sadness for myself keeps shame at bay.
A fleeting sight of some part, of somthing true, hidden under the shame…
The knock on the window of the van marked the final beat of the movement.
I get out and walk to work with my friend.
I spend the day banging wedges under the door marked ‘compassion’.
It’s cracked open, and I fear the tearful pain of kindness that stands behind it.
That door stands in the wall of my withdrawing.
Built brick by lonely brick. It keeps me safe from feeling - for a while.
But like the owners of the shoreside houses on the quay,
I dread the rising tide. The coming flood, when a storm surge drives the waves,
Up and over defensive bulwarks, sloshing in through every crack.
Waves of feeling surge, rise and crash.
It would be better if there were no wall.
No hindrance to their advances nor the waning of their ebbing flood.
Maybe a brick has come adrift as I write this.
I wonder what happened as you read?
Listening to - our lives entwined - Leaving Laurel