joy in the shadows of sorrow/on being soft

i used to be soft.

i used to care so deeply i felt like atlas, my shoulders so heavy i was scared they'd fall right off my body.

i used to be so soft i'd cry watching parents drop their kids off to the bus and earthworms on the sidewalk on a hot summer day, flailing their torsos trying to wriggle to the grass.

i'm told i'm scary now.

i'm told everyone i know was scared of me when they first met me, my partner and his friends and my brother's partner and her friends and random people i met at the library.

when people meet me now i know they imagine it impossible for me to be soft. i know they imagine it impossible for me to be vulnerable. i know they imagine it impossible for me to lean on anyone for support. i think my parents think that about me.

i remember the girl i was. i remember feeling everything. the highs were good but the lows were too low to rest on any one set of shoulders. i remember after a bad heartbreak, a girl in high school asked me how i dealt with all the pain that comes from caring. i had found it interesting, back then, that she understood. people say to love deeply is to hurt deeply, but they seem to always isolate it to romance. but to love is more than an action. when you care you leave your organs out on display, for anyone to do what they will with it. its dangerous and naiive. it's puppy love – they say you'll never be able to love as freely as you did before your first heartbreak for that same reason. but i had never experienced heartbreak. but i was soft, and maybe that's the same thing.

she had asked me that question, and i remember i had told her that there was nothing i wanted more than to be able to not care. to close myself off, to not deal with the immense burden anymore.

and then somehow i did. and by the time i wanted to undo it, i couldn't remember how i had even cared in the first place. for four years i was like that. detached. i was still hurting, but all of a sudden i couldn't express it, and somehow blocked off my ability to feel it, to process it. my friends tried to get me to open up. they knew i needed it, more than anything. my family too. but at that point whatever i was hiding from them i was hiding from myself.

i stopped picking the earthworms up off the sidewalks to the grass those days.

i almost missed meeting the perfect person because of it. because i wasn't soft enough, because he wanted sweetness. it's been over a year since we started talking and still i worry i can't be sweet enough.

but because of him, i'm starting to be soft again, and it's the greatest single gift i could've ever received. i cried this morning. i cried multiple times today, actually. i cried yesterday too, i think, and the day before that. and it's the greatest single gift i could've ever received.

my body and mind get overwhelmed; i haven't experienced this much sheer emotion in a while. it feels bad in the moment, but it feels. and for that i'm grateful.