Every Word You Cannot Say

by Iain S. Thomas

don’t know why, but I do not feel like I’m like you, or anyone else. I feel like I’m the only one who feels the things I feel, or thinks the way I think. I’m worried that I’m taking everything too seriously, or not seriously enough. Sometimes I want you to see me, and sometimes I want to disappear.

I don’t know if I’ve ever truly felt like the ground beneath me was firm. 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 am nice to people I don’t like because I don’t know what else to do. I feel like I’m waiting for something but I don’t know what it is. I often walk past people in the street, and I wonder if anyone else is waiting too. I don’t know if I’m ever, really, “Here.”

So I’m fine.* *I am not fine.

I know that you get ink on your fingers and don’t know when it’ll come off. I know strangers can stain your heart in the same way.

I know sometimes your brain is too loud and your heart bangs on the ceiling with a broom, screaming, “Shut up, you’re going to ruin this for us.” I know sometimes, it’s too late, and the music plays on.

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.

I know that, sometimes, you wish someone would just say the words you needed to hear because, sometimes, you don’t even know what those words are.

Here: When you’re lost, take a brief moment to find yourself. In every moment. In every breath. In every star. In every blade of grass. In every lost toy. In every forgotten song. In every burnt map. In every broken glass. In every memory of perfume. In every taste. In every line. In your heart. In trust.

Over time, you will play every character in the story. You will love and be loved. You will hate and be hated. You will be cruel and you will be kind.

The world becomes better when good people like you look at themselves and decide what kind of life they want to live, and what they’re willing to do to make it that way. This does not mean you need to fight more. It means you need to find ways to fight less.

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.

(And I know you’re worried about what it takes to live, to speak, to start to feel better.)

We only hear the loudest voices when really, we should be listening to the quietest.

You can be someone who matters to others. You can be someone who matters to you.

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.

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.

So do not ask for an easy life, with nothing to do. An easy life is not a good life.

We all want to love. We’re all afraid we are alone. We’re afraid no one will know who we were. Because on some level, we all know you can die without love, without anyone, without even you knowing who you are.

“Show me the fix, the thing you did to make yourself whole, before you were broken. Where is the God of everything that heals? Can you pray to him?” (What you feel is not brokeness, it is the desire to love yourself how you were meant to be loved. It is your heart crying out.)

In your head, in the dream, you are both the monster and the person the monster is chasing.

*Sometimes, when we’re awake, the monster is still there. Maybe we can’t see him as clearly, maybe he’s not as obvious as he usually is, but he’s there, somewhere, saying: “You are not good enough. You do not deserve to be loved the way you want to be loved. Something will always be wrong with you, no matter how much you try and fix yourself. You will always be looking for something you cannot find.”

Break every vow that hurts you. Take every opportunity. Light all fires. Turn all keys.

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.

Given enough time, every building collapses, every flower turns to ash, every candle burns out, every name must be forgotten.

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.§

Why do we hurt ourselves more, when other people hurt us? Why do we beat ourselves up, for feeling beat up? Maybe the lesser pain you cause yourself distracts you from the bigger pain inside. And it’s easy to get stuck in a kind of loop of pain. You’re hurt, so you hurt yourself some more.

And sometimes anger is your body’s way of telling you that you’re ready to change things.

You get to decide what eats you up. 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. 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.

“Oh if only we’d known, if only we’d listened.”

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.

“You have changed the way I love, by the way that you loved me. I love differently now. Maybe even less. Maybe there’s less of me to love.

—why do you talk to ghosts? —because so often, the living don’t listen.

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

“Sometimes, I hide in a coffee shop because I want to hear my name being called by a stranger, by someone I haven’t disappointed yet.

I hope you can close your heart like a flower between these pages. So that your heart can open again. So that you can leave behind every bad thing that’s hung on too long.

You hurt me. You were meant to be kinder than you were. You were meant to be better. And I was owed more than this. And you let me down, when I thought you were the only one who wouldn’t.

But I will throw everything that hurts to the ground and leave it where it lies. But I will carry on, despite the world. But I will become what I needed. Because I am, and I will, and I can.

You cannot fix me because I am not broken. And even though everything has changed, I am still more me than I’ve ever been.