negotiations

Sometimes when we talk I feel like those cave divers who go in search of one thing but find canyons and caverns no one has ever discovered, these pockets of feelings, of trapped air, I just haven’t explored yet. It’s startling, and it’s unsettling, and I guess I’d forgotten lately that I’m human too.

I’ve been wondering about the circular nature people move in, around, and through our lives. I’m wondering if we orbit, if sometimes we come to each other, and other times, if the orbit is so large that we won’t cross again in this lifetime, maybe it’s too far into the future to see how this all plays out.

In any case. I think it can be easy to forget how we have shared ourselves with someone, to negotiate an easy memory of the past, one that doesn’t hurt in the afternoon, one that doesn’t keep us awake at night. I’ve never been a fan of easy, we were never easy, I don’t know why I’ve chosen it now.

I like the idea of someone out there knowing me in ways I don’t even know myself. It feels like there is someone walking around, maybe against their will, with tiny pieces of me fragmented in memories. I wonder if we lined up all our memories in our orbit, which ones would overlap, how many I have that you never will.

And I think for now, I am going to decide to feel and explore those spaces I pretended were not there, to map out these uncharted spaces of myself, and negotiate a new negotiation in which feeling for better or worse is entirely the point.