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.