But this is how you know me

But this is how you know me.

This softness, this tenderness. This space between smiles, this laughter. This lightness in my chest, where the ribs expand, now holding more than room between heaving sobs. Where this mirror reflects more than darkness at the edges, where four pairs of eyes do not follow each two.

This is how you have known me – and it feels a little like insanity. Who is this person, who is she?

I haven’t known her this way. I do not know her at all. She laughs, her teeth flash in her mirth. She bares them, sure, but when, it is mock anger, not rage. They are no longer needles of frustrations, dulling their edges biting pillows in the night. They are no longer the inflicters of anger turned inward on her knuckles, her arms. They just… are. And they smile at you, they nibble at nails, they show in photographs. Where did she learn this? And how?

It shows, how it tears at me inside, that it shows, the rest, too. When did she become this soft, when did she learn, that it was permitted to be? That there was a world beyond guarding and defending, beyong being caged, beyond hiding. Who is this, who is this woman, she loves unabashedly, she loves with some perverse certainty, some confidence that I am secretly sure is born of folly- surely, it must be? Who told her that it’s okay to love this freely? Doesn’t she know, hasn’t she learned? She’s going to get her hands burnt- hasn’t she been warned?

These trappings, these trappings of normalcy, these colors, these hours, these are lies she’s stealing from someone else. She is someone else, someone I have not known, someone I dared not know. And now she is here, and she is loud, and she is loved, and I am terrified. I am terrified of her, and of you, and of all these people milling about in this dream. Because this has to be a dream, one that I will wake up from, one that you might wake up from, and then, and then, where will that girl who has learned softness be? She will have to go, and then there will just be… me.