Restless Things

Fragile Moments

I wish I could say something clever. Utter some string of lovely syllables. Something loquacious but beautiful. A charming tragedy or pleasant soliloquy. But here I am, in the stillness of night, where I usually find myself in moments scarred by fragility, struggling.

But I suppose these moments are not meant to be easy, are they? When we're trapped within ourselves. Our minds running away, to all those dark places we pretend to have forgotten. Or released like caged birds. They couldn't belong to us, oh no, not these dark places. How could we admit to ownership? Something shameful or exposing, we couldn't possibly own that.

I think that's why so many people are afraid of solitude. It's that deafening quiet that's so damn haunting. Because our memories beg to be heard. They refuse to rot in the dark, like we've crafted them to. Or slip away into oblivion, like lost things. They're hungry. And when silence slithers it's way into our space, we give in. It's only natural.

But it breaks us. These quiet screaming moments. Sometimes we crumble, at our cores and cave into ourselves, utterly surrendered. Those are the worst. When we haven't the strength to stand anymore. We purge it from our system by breaking completely. At first we don't even realize we're crying until we can't breathe; our lungs ache, our stomachs clench, our muscles burn.

And it's exhausting. It gets ahold of our chest and takes everything.

We are pouring our souls out of ourselves. Opening up and letting everything fall out. Suddenly we're releasing something we didn't even know was there. Some pain, or anger, that's snaked it's way into our cavity and has nested in our bones.

And it's this foreign parasite that has us on the floor now, crippled. We have to claw at our inside just to scrape it out. It's made us sick. It's pulled and tugged and stretched inside of us and we can't breathe.

It's insidious. Quiet at first, fooling us into happiness. And maybe we are happy, some of us anyway. Some of us, lucky enough to be plagued by content, or fullness, or nauseating bliss. But there is no immunity to humanity. And it's human to feel pain, or moments of sadness, or aching anger.

So there it is. Inside us. We're laughing and breathing and living and feeling and then suddenly we're breaking. Maybe we've been left alone too long, or not long enough. Or we've been trying too hard when we hadn't realized we were even trying. Happiness requires work after all. And that's exhausting too, being happy all the time.

It's funny to think of it; happiness can break us. Nothing is absolute, or constant. But that's the problem with happiness, we think it has to be. We think that happiness is meant to be constant, to be truly happy we can never be sad. But that's inhuman.

And that's when it catches up to us. And we close our doors and draw our curtains and push the world away; hushing it for this fragile moment. This crippling moment. This breaking moment.

And it's ours. Just ours. Intimately and emotionally ours. Something the world could never touch, or feel, or take. These fragile moments belong to us. They bend us, fold us, break us. Then, suddenly, we're built up again. Emptied out and breathing. Our chests loosen, our stomachs cool, and we're done. We've restarted. We're broken and we're whole. We're human. Horribly, painfully, wonderfully human.