the spaces between.

My Grandmother is a stubborn woman. She is not one to show her cards so quickly, but I have never seen her face light up the way it does when she talks with her grandchildren. She tells me that when I was young, I seemed to feel the full threshold of life. Almost on accident, like a fall, but as frequently as changing clothes, I’d slip past the doorway and be gone for a while.

I thought that’s what loneliness was then. The spaces between my grandmother’s quilt squares, the gaps amidst my mother’s palm holding mine, or something within sentences exchanged that I was not meant to hear. Because it wasn’t just loneliness, but the coming and going of it. The fact that I, really, had nothing to do with any of it at all. I’d be sitting at the park, someone’s child would cry and I’d be back. The sweat of my hairline would dry and send a chill down my spine. The heat of those around me would never reach me, not through my clothes at least.

I’m realizing that I have been lonely in such a way for so long that I often search for it in extremes. If I was not able to enter life on my own terms, then I wanted to exit inside of it. Not leave it entirely, but find another route through.

I wanted to evaporate into the moisture of morning dew, lay my back flat against a porch chair, and dry out. One day, I’d become an object that no one missed or needed, one that they could leave alone or behind.

Yet, I have never gone back to that feeling. Never revisited or yearned for it. Instead, I found a seam between these worlds I closed. Needless to say, I am not as lonely anymore.

I think my Grandmother would be proud of that.