Every Word You Cannot Say

by Iain S. Thomas

I don’t know your name. But I do know that it was beautiful to your mother and that the first time she said it, and decided it was yours, she smiled. I know she said it several times after that, like the words to a beautiful song only she knew. She tried it on like a beautiful summer day.

I know you feel things and wish sometimes that someone was there to tell you that you’re allowed to feel everything you’re feeling.

You cannot say it is the absence of them, and the presence of them, and the difference between those two things, that hurts the most.

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.

There is only one real sin in the end, and that is not being who you are, not listening to your soul, and forgetting who you wanted to be. It’s hard but without anything to overcome, we would not become ourselves. Sometimes, this is all meant to be hard.

In your head, in the dream, you are both the monster and the person the monster is chasing. You are your fear and your love and you are the embodiment of all the things you feel. Only you hold you back, or push you forward.*

(You are still everything you could be.)

Do not confuse being in the same room, with spending good time with another human being. Do not confuse the distractions of the world, with the world itself.

And there is great joy in finding yourself every single day and saying in your own voice: “I know who I am. I am the one that looks for me. And every single day, I find me again. I find myself in the things I do and the things I notice. I find myself in crowds and in solitude. I find myself in quiet moments and at the top of tall mountains. I find myself in the tips of waves, in forests, and in the books I read. I find myself in leaves and rain and old photos. Every single day, I find me again.”

Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is not kindness. Within you, there is all the kindness you will ever need.

Living the life you want, after you live the life you have, doesn’t actually work.

We all miss something or someone we’re not supposed to miss.

And I wanted to say: “I have had every conversation we never got to have with myself.”