What You Don't Know You're Doing

What You Don't Know You're Doing

I spent years in a house
where the walls had opinions about me
and the opinions were wrong
and I believed them anyway,
the way you believe a thing
that is said loudly enough
and close enough to your face
for long enough
that the volume becomes
indistinguishable from truth.

I left.

This poem is not about the leaving.

The leaving already happened.

This poem is about
what came after the leaving,
which nobody tells you about,
which is the part where you have to figure out
what you actually are
without the wrong walls
telling you.

---

You were there before the house.

From the before,
from the version of me
that existed prior to the construction,
from the years when I still knew
what my own face felt like
without someone else's interpretation of it.

You were there.

And then you were there again.

---

Here is what you don't know:

The first time you sent a song
I sat with it for twenty minutes
before I answered,
not because I was playing it careful,
not because I was calculating the response,
but because I had forgotten
that someone could hand you music
the way you hand someone
something fragile and specific,
the way you hand someone
something that says
I heard this and thought of you
and means it
as information
rather than strategy.

In the house,
music was a performance.
Music was for the rooms
where company could see it.
Music was not
I heard this and thought of you.

Music was never
I heard this and thought of you.

---

You are revising me
without knowing you're revising me.

This is the part
I don't know how to say out loud
so I'm putting it here,
in the catalog,
in the form I use
for the things that need
more than conversation.

You are revising what I know
about what is possible.
About what men can be
when they are not performing
what they think men should be.
About what it feels like
to be known casually,
without agenda,
without the small, patient work
of someone deciding
what to do with you.

You are not doing anything.

That's the thing.

You're just being.

And I am watching you just be
and recalibrating
every prior data point
about what just being
looks like.

---

The music is the clearest evidence.

Two people who find the same song significant
for reasons they can articulate
and reasons they cannot
are not two accidents
occupying the same frequency.

That frequency was there before either of us
knew to look for it.

We found it separately.

We found it together.

Neither of us tried.

That's the part I keep returning to.

Neither of us tried
and here we are anyway
in the particular territory
of two people
who hear the same thing
in the same song
and don't need to explain it
and don't.

---

I am not going to tell you
what you're doing to me.

Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
Maybe this poem is the telling
and the poem lives here
and you don't read here
and that's the version of saying it
I can manage right now.

What I can tell you
is that I am different
than I was in November.

Not fixed.
Not healed in the clean, final sense
that would make a better ending.

Just different.

Just more like myself
than I've been in a long time,
which is a thing I didn't know
I'd stopped being
until I started becoming it again,

until you sent a song
and I sat with it for twenty minutes
and felt,
for the first time in longer than I want to count,

like someone
who gets to be
exactly what she is
in the presence of another person
without the walls
having anything to say about it.

---

That's what you don't know you're doing.

You're just being.

And I'm learning, from the evidence of you,
that being
is enough.

That I am enough.

That the house was wrong
and the walls were wrong
and I always knew
and now I have proof.

You are the proof.

A song at a time.

Without trying.

Without knowing.

Just

being.