Small Worlds

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

We’re young and often struggle to express just what it is we need, but I know we all value closeness.

It was there that I noticed I only really knew myself in song. In the quiet, in the freedom, in the surrender.

To go back home is to wrangle with who you are against who everyone thinks you should be.

Whenever darkness falls, I get the sense that I’ll take a wrong turn, and forever be trying to find a way out, like a snake eating its own tail.

I’ve leaned on the same group of friends for so long that here, so far from home, I struggle with the openness it takes to grow close to anyone new.

I’m unable to find a way to say that since arriving, I don’t feel like myself, or rather, I don’t like this version of me, who’s insecure and rarely at ease, who doesn’t know how to dismantle his loneliness.

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Despite their best intentions, each moment spent in their presence feels like I’m intruding upon something.

I tell him about the shame and the tiredness, he reminds me what I once told him: how arbitrary to put your fate into the hands of a small group, when so much of the music relies on feeling.

there’s something pressing at the inside of my chest, trying to break free. And as I say this, maybe I’ll realize it’s me.

I probably won’t call Ray tomorrow, and if I do, I’ll hide my desire away. I’ll hide away my solitude, how its enormity has turned it into something I don’t know how to wrangle with, something thick and heavy and suffocating. Rather than tell him of the loneliness, I’ll tell him it’s all OK, everything is OK.

It feels like a quiet life, but it’s mine. I’ve tried to build my own small world in the vastness, and it’s helping: I’m feeling more and more like the person I was, or the person I might become.

And because I don’t have the language, I do what comes easiest. I return to my solitude.

to sleep with grief is not to sleep at all.

Grief never ends, but we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind, rather than living in pain’s shadow.

There are certain moments which demand solitude,

because while the grief is never over, we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind.

You tell your landlord times are hard. He says, holding the keys to his multiple properties, ‘Times are hard for all of us.’

You’re stuck somewhere between the inability to cry and the desire to do so. You’re worried your own body is storing harm in the seclusion of its darkness. You’re worried that there’s only so much your heart can take.

it’s been so long since you’ve known freedom. Maybe you’ve never been free.

Maybe this is all we need sometimes, for someone else to believe in the possibilities you see for yourself.