A glass, darkly

“You don’t have to understand things for them to be.” If there is a thread running through the different pieces of my life so far, this is it.

As a senior in high school, I discovered this excerpt while searching the internet for a yearbook quote. At that time, it was so important to me to find words that expressed my internal world, who I really was and who I just couldn’t seem to be on the outside. I had wrestled immensely with growing up, with understanding myself in relation to everything else that wasn’t me. But sometimes that line blurred.

I was heartsick for something, and I kept finding pieces of myself in unexpected places. Parts of me had fallen away and changed. I couldn’t see just what, only shadows in the battlefields of movie sets, dusty rafters at the theatre or light spilling through my backyard fence.

The sense of loss was all-consuming. Something had lived and left so softly, I never knew it was mine.

Wherever and whenever it left was when the great unraveling started that left the thread for me to unwind. But the more I tugged, the more I saw the same shadows, cast by many different objects along the way.   

I was desperate with the sickness of confusing loss, the sickness of growing up: the dizzying need to understand and be understood. “You don’t have to understand things for them to be,” was a balm for my aching heart, so recently aware of itself.

With time, the ache has eased, but never left. The shadows are still there too, in the old places and new ones: in scattered garbage along the road, in the dusty edges of the gas pump, in the laundry hanging out to dry.

In the pulling and the pushing, life shifts. With the news of friends and friends of friends, gone, it pauses. It unravels in the heartbreak of managing the ache and the joy of chasing shadows. It isn’t wrong to hold onto the things you do not understand. They are the thread that carry you through.