Every Word You Cannot Say

by Iain S. Thomas

Things always feel like they’re moving and I never get the chance to catch up to them and when I do, it feels like it all goes too quickly.

I know that the grass grew while you were sleeping. I know that somewhere on the other side of the world, the sun shone on people you will never meet.

I know that at least once, if not several times, someone you knew woke up in the middle of the night thinking of you and wondering what became of you. And they’ve contemplated calling you out of the blue.

We all think this a game we can win, and there will be a moment when the game is over, when we can look at each other and see each other’s cards, and say everything we meant to say when we were alive and we could speak.

We forget our successes and enshrine our failures. We forget there is still a child in all of us, begging for love. We forget that this is true of every person we meet.

Because we forget Time is coming, even though he’s always coming. We forget to listen to the poem in the grass and the light and the water. We try to sound clever, instead of listening to the heartbeat in the stars.

(What you feel is not brokeness, it is the desire to love yourself how you were meant to be loved.

The world will always wear you down, so let it wear you down until only the good remains. Hold on to the incredible parts of you that survive.

Sometimes, you think you don’t deserve goodness. But, I promise you, we all have things we think we don’t deserve.

There is a special kind of sadness that can only be found in the confusion between who you think you are and who you think other people want you to be.§

And you have no obligation to kindness. You can be kind as often as you want. Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is not kindness.

Don’t worry, time must pass, even in the moments when it feels like it can’t, or shouldn’t.

And we’re not everything we could be, because we’re afraid to allow ourselves to exist all at once, because too many people have told us not to.

Back in the dream I ask you if you would burn with me, if I burned, and you tell me that you’ve always burned for me, and in the dream, I believe you.