Everything Is

Dear Alianora,

You are four years old. You sit between your feet and watch the world from up close and down low. Everything is right there for you; grungy and slapping the pavement, dangled in water. Right now, you are content to be down low, little and unseen. The best feeling you can imagine is running across Sunday morning grass with dew between your toes and sunshine on you mind.

But Alianora, your world is going to grow, and you’re going to grow as well. You can’t see it all from down there, so you will move up to sit between your lungs and everything is good.

Dear Alianora,

You are seven years old. Your family is leaving the Sunday morning dew behind once your mother found out what the priests had done to her sister.

Instead, you will feel the harsh beauty of the winter air as it falls down inside you, cold and sharp and clean. You will wake up in new ways that make you alert to the warm heady-ness that the spring air brings while racing through the late winter sky, taunting us with unfulfilled promise. You will discover the power of words, and spend hours hypnotized by ink on paper. You will be entranced into late nights with flashlights under covers, on hammocks in the summer, on pavements while your siblings play around you. You will become a world traveler, and you won’t have even left your home town yet.

But Alianora, your words will grow, and so will your opinions. You’re eager to share what you had felt and read, and the newness of your words will clash with the practiced barbs of others. You will be left cold in ways the winter air never made you feel. So, instead, you silence your breath and made a passing kick at your voice as you climbed your ribs. You will take residence in a chamber of your heart and everything is … good.

Dear Alianora,

You’re nine years old. It had never been that way before, and it will never be that way again. You can never go back to a time of blissful ignorance, where you don’t know that, eventually, everything will end. There is something so comforting about things being settled exactly in their place, a contented feeling in the air as each puzzle piece of the world clicks into place. The winter air shatters as new life grows around it.  You will fall in love with your world and everything it brings you. But Alianora, the world will change, and so will you. A sickening lurch rocks you into oblivion as the puzzle pieces fall apart and reform to make a portrait of black suits and an open coffin.

The thing about loving so hard is that losing is even harder. You had once heard of a broken heart but never of a broken person who felt the way you did.

You will drag yourself out of the shattered chambers of your broken organ and into your throat. You will sit heavy on your tongue and say nothing until the pain is numbed.

There will be nothing to say or feel

and everything is good.

Dear Alianora,

When you’re thirteen, you will realize something. The thing about hearing what your voice wants to say is that after a while, when it keeps talking and talking and talking to no one but you, it starts to have some good ideas.

When you are silent, you are cold. You are frozen solid. If you even deign to glance at someone, the ice of your stare will chill them inside out. You will be a winter’s night on a fading summer day. But, after listening to only you for a while, you will become a frozen creek in spring, thawing and melting until CRACK! With snaps and pops, you will break the ice, tumbling out of your frosty skin prison, falling and rushing until the joy of your freedom bursts open in a waterfall of verbiage. Like bubbles racing to the top of a soda can, your laughter will fizz and explode to the surface. After a while of listening to only you, you are back. Your words once defined you and without them you were a grey shadow lingering in a past life.

But Alianora, people will have changed. The jibes and phrases that come out of your mouth will be heavy and unforgiving. Maybe they don’t understand, maybe they are confused—but no. People won’t talk to you anymore because they don’t like you. The direct connection from your thoughts to your words will have no toll booths, no checks for couth or social boundaries. With shame on your tongue, you will trek up to sit in the city of your thoughts to refine them at the source.

And everything is

good.

Dear Alianora,

You’re sixteen now, and you find out that thoughts are hard. They cut your hands as you try to catch them, store them as “rational” or “irrational”. Thoughts will hurt, not because of what they are, but because you find that often the thoughts known as dreams were stuffed in the file cabinet of irrationality, sometimes cross filed with “silly” or “ impossible.”

Still, it will get easier. With your mind as your home, things will become understandable, softer. The line between “hurtful” and “joking” will be drawn. It will not be a thin line, since you won’t know how to walk it yet, but as you do, you will discover something wonderful: you can make people laugh. It will become easy to become eloquent on paper, to tweak your school essays so the teachers see what they want. Wordplay will be a game, a jungle gym of sarcasm and wit. When you first hear the term “silver tongue”, you will smile. You know that things were hard down there. You will smile because they mean silver mind, silver thoughts, silver words, because that’s where it really happened.

But Alianora, life will get crowded, and so will you. Cabinets will grow miles high. Thoughts will be recycled, forgetfulness and deadlines piling to the ceiling. The city of your thoughts has a new dictator named anxiety. People won’t understand how hard you take things, how you aren’t able to deal with things that told you that you aren’t good enough. For your prowess at saying the right things you will never find the right way to express how it is in there, so you will say “I’m fine” constantly. You smile and find cheerfulness in your outside self, but in your epicenter you will radiate misery and constant panic. Questions like “How are you?” will become as difficult to answer as “Will I ever accomplish anything?”

You will find yourself climbing and pulling myself toward fresh air until finally finally finally you will sit on top of your mind, coolly watching the thrashing desecration below you, separated by a thin pane of glass.

And everything will be

good.

Dear Alianora,

Things are better up here. To have a little distance from myself is always a good thing, I suppose. I’m just a program, when it comes down to it, a passive stranger intruding but not really participating in her own life. I put in the variables, the emotions, the logic and the situation, and after a while the results come to me without any of the agonizing. It’s the smart thing really, the cavalier approach to life. Things don’t really hurt me—well, I mean, I guess they do, but it doesn’t reach me up here.

But sometimes I take a journey. Down to my toes, to feel the grittiness and sweat as my friends and I hiked three miles up a mountain to see our lives from above, to cherish the way the snowmelt stream washed me off and shocked me to excitement, blood running hot and fast in my veins. Sometimes I take a journey to my lungs, to feel them tighten as my sister talks about her cancer and to count every breath as precious because I’m still breathing and so is she. Sometimes, I take a journey to my heart and mourn the loss of my loved ones, but also find new love in the secret ways people say I love you, like when my mom forces seconds onto my plate, or the way people hold my hand in the dark. Sometimes, I take a journey to my voice and feel like my words are firecrackers as I sit on the bus and the sun sinks from the sky. Sometimes, I take a journey to my thoughts and wrestle my anxiety into the Irrational Cabinet and for a moment I feel like everything will turn out okay.

But things are better from far away. The thing about loving so hard is that losing is harder, so it’s better to be farther away.

On the top of my mind, I’m as far away from everything as possible.

And everything is…

-Sincerely, you.