Still Learning How to Let It

I keep waiting for the catch.

This is not a charming quirk. This is a survival mechanism wearing a quirk's clothes, a system that was built in rooms where the good thing was always the setup for the worse thing,

and now there is no worse thing and the system doesn't know what to do with that so it invents one, just in case, just to be prepared, just to not be the person caught off guard again by her own hope.

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I am very good at this.

At holding something real at arm's length while pretending I'm just being careful.

At calling fear by the more respectable name of realistic expectations.

At building the case for why this won't last before this has even decided what it is yet.

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Here is the thing I don't say out loud:

I want to let you in.

I want to stop doing the mental math on every good moment, calculating the odds, checking for the fine print, waiting for the terms and conditions of this particular happiness to reveal themselves as something I should have seen coming.

I want to just be here.

In the good thing. Without the audit.

I don't know how to do that yet.

I am working on it.

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Is this really happening.

I ask myself this more than I'd like to admit.

In the middle of the ordinary, in the middle of a conversation that feels like a key in a lock I forgot I had, in the middle of a song sent at the exact right moment like someone reached into my chest and found the frequency without being given the map,

is this really happening.

And the answer is yes. The evidence says yes. The yes is sitting right here.

And I am over here building a bunker against the yes just in case the yes turns into something else,

which it might, which everything might, which is not a reason to live in the bunker instead of the yes.

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The insecurity is not pretty.

I want to say that plainly because the poem could make it pretty, could dress it up in the romantic language of a woman who is guarded and therefore interesting, a woman whose walls make her a project, a puzzle, a challenge worth solving.

That's not what this is.

This is just fear.

Old fear. Accumulated fear. The fear of a person who has been through enough rooms where the good thing turned out to have conditions she didn't know about until the conditions were being enforced,

and who is now standing in what appears to be a room with no conditions and cannot stop checking the walls for the fine print.

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I want to open up.

I practice it sometimes, in the small hours, the way you practice a difficult conversation before you have it,

saying the true thing to no one, feeling how it sits in the mouth, whether the mouth can hold it without immediately offering a disclaimer, a softener, a never mind, forget I said that.

The true thing is:

I am scared.

I am scared because this is good and good things have a complicated history with me and my nervous system has not yet received the memo that this one might be different.

The memo is in transit.

I am waiting for delivery.

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What I want:

To stop flinching at the good thing.

To let the bright thing be bright without immediately reaching for the dimmer.

To say the true thing without the disclaimer.

To be seen without redirecting the gaze to a more manageable version of what I am.

To trust the yes.

To live in the yes.

To stop building the bunker and just

stand in the open

and let whatever is good here be good,

and if it ends deal with the ending then, not now, not in advance, not in the pre-suffering that costs everything and prevents nothing.

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I am scared.

This is real.

Both of those are true at the same time and I am learning, slowly, with the patience the work requires,

that scared and real can coexist,

that I don't have to choose between protecting myself and being here,

that being here is its own protection,

that the good thing is allowed to just be good,

and I am allowed to let it.

I am working on the letting.

I am so close.