Slanting Towards the Sea

by Lidija Hilje

I can’t remember the last time someone said I had potential. But the thing about potential is that it doesn’t go away. If you fail to realize it, you don’t simply lose it. Instead, it sediments inside you, like tar or asbestos, slowly releasing its poison.

Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly intelligent people.

Some nights, I would climb on top of him as he was reading, holding him so tight he would gasp. Wishing we could meld together, that I could crawl under his skin and stay there. “What is it?” he’d ask, but I couldn’t speak, devastated that I would never get close enough to him, that there would always be the skin, the bones, the substance of flesh between us. We would never be one body, there would always be this fear of us breaking into two.

But even then, I understood that those were only rationalizations, and underneath them all was this: for one to know what they want to be, they first need to know who they are. I knew myself only in relation to others: a daughter, a student. I understood myself only in negatives—what I didn’t want, who I didn’t want to be.

The thing about feeling too much is that sometimes you have to force yourself to feel less. That in order to preserve your heart, you have to close it off, deliberately deny it its main function, and reduce it to a mere pump.

It begs the question, then, where is that fine line between sacrifices that make sense and those that don’t? And how do we tell them apart?

Because even conceding to someone else’s wishes, giving in to meet someone else’s needs—even sacrificing yourself—is a choice.

I remember what he said to me when we were watching the Perseids, when he quoted Heraclitus. That there is an impermanence to all things, both good and bad. I thought it sounded either cynical or superbly Zen then. How he shrugged off the pain of being rejected over his acne, or denied the ache of living his uprooted life, his mother dying while he was still so young. Now I can’t help but think there’s a sort of defeatism to it. That it’s a coping mechanism. A way to keep the pain in check.

Because, we don’t set boundaries most easily with strangers or those who mistreat us. We set them with those who make us feel loved and safe, who hold space for us to admit our needs and limits, even when they’re the ones paying the price for it.