could anyone do it better?

not really

Though sincerity likes to bite your tongue when a loaded question is served over white napkins and dessert wine, if you’ve dedicated the first half of your life to getting things right and the second to grieving what ended up going wrong, there’s a chance you’re not as happy as you once swore you would be. Shame doesn’t know what pride feels like because they’ve never been in the same room before. Only tonight everyone’s invited. Only tonight you’ve gathered the ungovernable together, assigned them seats, sent out reminders. You couldn’t get by or past it, so you thank everyone for coming.

Now, sitting on the edge of a better sentence, we can’t quite know if speaking has some unknown advantage over staying shut and saving face. I’m not surprised you’re running into dissonance: you’ve always been the kind of woman who wishes she could stay the same but also a completely different person. You revised and tweaked, went back to the drawing board, and looked for salvation in Facetune and rice cakes and Greek mythology, but it never reached the threshold of enough. Too long of a road trip it was, so you swerved out the exit lane. Luggage requirements: sunscreen, privacy, an embroidered handkerchief, muscle memory, ribbons. You wanted to be like that one celebrity with her hair done, so you got a Dyson. No, not like that, looks like shit. You wanted to be a woman with an agenda, so you made sure your calendar was packed and your mind slightly agitated and bitter at all times.

You haven’t felt like yourself in a long time, maybe ever, and you’re not sure whether the ozone hole is for the way you used to look or talk, how this very specific grocery store aisle used to feel, or how dignified you sat in your cardboard excuses. In any case, the life you’re living isn’t yours as much as the memory of everything with your initials on it. If your name is written on something, then you own it. If you’ve cried tears over it, then it owns you. Everybody cheers for the girl on top of the mountain but no one can convince her that she really climbed it. Scraped knees and bruises are your best proof. When they look up to you, you don’t believe them. And when they love you, you assume it’s on a buy now pay later scheme.

We gather at the table around seven nonetheless. There’s cheese and recess and stories from different nooks of the world, each packed with mystique and pain, all that grips scaffolding with certainty and won’t let go. We’re being girls together, you’re failing Bechdel but scoring solidarity. A good confession is worth ten cruel words. More of this, less of that. You look around, and everyone is smart and accomplished and celebrates you with brilliance, the first of many suppers, so you spare the ellipses in your dog-eared protocols and now all of it matters less than you thought it would but hurts more than you were prepared for.

Here’s one thing I learned and can relay with advocacy: I know myself damn well because I have to. A stranger to my body is someone in the mirror still, so I squint and walk past. It’s okay, really. I know my tossing, how to stay nourished and advanced, that sometimes simply doing the thing is all it takes to avoid grey hair and stagnation, that not all women wish you well and not all men were sent to wreak havoc on your amygdala. Authority matters, but so does knowing how and when to bend the rules, and if the punishment is worth the rumination. It almost always is.

What is this weird, soft feeling anyway? Aching in the wood knocking and deep breathing through the laughter, something greater. I’m standing in the middle of my garden. I watered, and it blossomed, and now we get to be dumbfounded that it’s working out.

No one could do this life better than you because it’s yours. You are the birthday princess and the prosecutor, relishing in the abysmal, not someone imitating both. There couldn’t have been a version of the story in which they’re kind to touch and stay a little longer by your side. There couldn’t have been a version of the story in which you’ve got dignity, symmetrical tits, and a lifeline of hereditary intelligence stretching over paragraphs in linear progression. There couldn’t have even been a story in which all grudges are washed away around those who gave life to you. This is it, sticky, uncertain, going upwards, going sideways, freckled, fuck-my-life-i-don’t-want-this, gratuitous high. Take it or leave it.

Can you imagine if you never started? Can you imagine if you waited for the sky to clear? Neither can I. I waited so long to be ready, I didn’t know the only thing required of me was stepping out the door. But we’re both outside now. Might as well.