What are you willing to give? A wise person asked me that once. It’s not a complicated question, but be careful. Your answer is a challenge to the gods. A labyrinth you should be ready to enter once you’ve answered. Because once you set those forces in motion? Once you decide what you’re willing to give? Mark my words, you will be asked to give it. I didn’t have an answer right away. I spent a lot of time thinking about it though. Rolling it around on my tongue as I crept toward the outer edges of who I’d become. I held it like a talisman between my teeth as I peered into the chasms I’d lost myself in. What are you willing to give? It was the whisper of a silent spell. I was opening the cage. Unleashing the dogs of war. Finally, I had an answer. I’m willing to give this life unfettered access to the vulnerable skin across my abdomen. I’m willing to let her hone her blade against my cheek. I’m willing to let her make me nauseous and sick until I purge the bitten-back words and self-abandonment from my bones. I’m willing to paint the walls black and fuchsia and pale; to build sanctuary in me big enough to hold the howl of loss in perfect pitch. I’m willing to give anything to have the salvation I deserve. Anything. I’m willing to open and open and open for her. I said what I said. I meant it. I meant it because I thought I'd already given all those things. Thought I'd cloistered myself in self-protection— been vaccinated by all the shit I’d just been through: The grief of babies and brothers dying, the loose ends of broken-hearted family. Flesh-eating skin hunger. Bottomless oceans of lonely. I was ready for my close-up. Ready for my well-deserved salvation. My reward. I'd met someone. I thought she was my reward.
You can write some very bold things when you’re on the precipice of loving someone. That’s the ledge I wrote those words from. Leaning dangerously over a canyon I couldn’t see the bottom of, being held in place by a gorgeous, blue-eyed sirocco wind I knew nothing about. But my god— the view from her. The view of love from the top. The unspoiled edge of creation. The crisp eyesight and the vibrancy that lives between your legs. The sound your skin makes when it longs for the touch of someone it’s never felt. The way your brain can suddenly make something that’s never happened before, happen. You feel it without having it yet. Her tongue against your teeth, her fingers in your mouth, her eyes glued to yours— it’s all an intoxication of existing in a place you’ve never existed in until now. You’re bending metal with your mind. You’ll say anything. You’ll give. Anything. And you’ll hold. Sweet Jesus how you’ll hold. You’ll hold while you wait. You’ll hold while you hope and while you dream. You’ll hold so close this piece of art you cut from your tissue paper heart. You’ll hold through the places you should've let go, and you’ll hold through the days of silence and knowing better. You’ll hold while you’re still letting yourself lean further and further out over the canyon, even though the wind has subsided. You become a paperchain of holding. Still betting on that sirocco, still creating with your brain things your tender baby heart will have to put back together real soon. Because real soon, you will still be holding when what she really loves comes back for her— and it’s not you. You will still be holding when the wind stops dead and the canyon floor comes at you like a train. It will be a few raw months before you come back around to the question of what you’re willing to give, and you’ll have no choice but to look at your first answer. The one you wrote from the high perch of almost love. If you’re being honest, you’ll wonder if maybe you weren’t a little too full of yourself when you wrote it. Maybe you were ignorantly summoning those little devils and they came— running their pitchforky blades across your cheek and abdomen, taunting you to stay open open open. Holding your hair as you vomited, and whispering, it’s okay...open some more. This is just the canyon bottom. No further to go. Now you know how much you need a god. She’ll come get you baby girl, but not til we’re done here. Or maybe your body knew things first. Maybe your tight hips and stiff neck and bruised sternum were prescient— flowing through your hands onto the page. Maybe they knew what was coming. Were testing your mettle. Putting your money where your mouth now hung gaping. Gasping. Fear can be another form of love; a message telling you to listen. Self-abandonment is always your first clue. Wind is not a thing meant to hold you. Wait until you feel the sure, loving hand of one with a strong grip on the back of your shirt collar before you lean over canyons. Do not look for yourself in someone else’s pieces. Be willing to give all you gave, but to you first. You aren’t that hard to find. You are not a secret to be kept. Loving you is not a hardship. You are easy to love. You are also the thing you are seeking. The thing that cannot be taken. Broad sunshine. Even when it rains. You are entitled to all of it because you exist. Because you breathe. You know this. You know this because you still love the girl who left. Because she showed you what she was willing to give, and the only honest response to that is to cheer her on from the canyon floor. Even though it was you she gave, you cheer her on and on. You hope she wins. Somewhere inside you, you want to believe you already have. Broken open and grateful for deep, pure, soul-purging love— no matter how long it stays, no matter how fast the bottom of the canyon comes at you when the wind stops. You want to believe in that faith of the dark arts, so you try. You try and try and try. The two of you have survived a kind of short, inexplicable war together. Does it really matter if you ever speak again? All the beauty was spoken in the foxhole, bullets whizzing overhead. Spoken. Seen. Held. Released. Hallelujah. The holy cycle of love. Short. Sweet. Clean. The best part? You get to keep the parting gifts. They are the things you were willing to give anything for. You take them home now, and you lay them sweetly beside the exhaustion and the pain. You sigh deeply and you pull the weighted blanket of salvation up to your chin, and you dream the dreams of what hearts can create on their own, what brains can believe even when they can’t see it, and what bodies always know first. And you open. You open and open and open.
* I wrote this back in 2021. It’s interesting to release an old ache for a minute— stand it against the doorframe and hashmark how much taller you stand now.
I remember distinctly the feeling of hitting the canyon bottom. I remember losing feeling everywhere except my heart. I remember thinking I’d lost something precious. And I remember my therapist telling me: Kate, the gifts are yours. Yours to keep.
As I reread it this morning, I thought maybe someone else could use the reminder. The gifts are yours to keep. xo
It will happen sometime!
At a far simpler and less dramatic level, I have chosen to allow sometimes surprisingly deep connections to develop quickly as I travel, knowing full well that I will experience actual pain when the time comes for us to go our separate ways after minutes or hours or days or weeks or moths or years or decades. To be free to connect, to love, I need to be free to let them go. I say that with such ease and mess it up too often -- mostly without anyone's awareness but mine.