The Strange Comfort of Low Expectations

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I stopped hoping loudly. Somewhere between one year and the next I set it down — the large, embarrassing hope — the way you set down a bag you forgot you were carrying.

My shoulders remembered first.

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There is a specific freedom in wanting less. Not nothing. Less. In learning to hold things loosely enough that when they go your hands are already open.

You practice it until it stops feeling like loss. Then it stops feeling like practice.

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I used to wait. For the call that would change things, the moment, the turn, the version of events where I was finally chosen without having to ask.

I am not waiting anymore.

What I have instead is morning. Coffee. The particular silence of a house that belongs entirely to me. A window I can stand at without hoping something will happen outside it.

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People confuse this with sadness. They look at the quiet life and see what is missing from it, all the loud beautiful things I must have given up.

They are looking at it wrong.

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Grief is wanting something you cannot have. This is not grief. This is standing at the edge of a lake at the end of summer, the water going still, and feeling — honestly, completely — that you do not need to swim.

You came. You looked. That is enough. That has always been enough. You are only just now letting yourself believe it.

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Low expectations are not a wound or a wall or a story about everything that failed.

They are the moment after the exhale. The body, finally, at rest. The quiet that was there all along, waiting patiently beneath all that noise for you to stop and sit down in it.

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I am sitting down in it.

It fits.