The veneer cracks on a Tuesday. Not with drama, not with thunder, but with the quiet hiss of something finally giving way. I used to imagine collapse as cinematic— horns, smoke, maybe an apologetic monologue. Instead, it was paperwork, polite emails, and people saying “just following protocol.” Protocol, I’ve learned, is a hymn sung off-key by a tired choir.
The trouble with paperwork is how well it behaves. Every line has a place to go. Every box can be checked. A page can be perfectly in order while the life it describes is coming apart. I wanted to write something in the margin. There ought to be a box for how it felt to read this. There ought to be room for the five minutes afterward, when I took a sip of coffee and realized I’d forgotten to swallow. I suspect the form would have come back with a polite request to stay within the margins. Fair enough. I had been asking other people to stay within mine for years.
I sat with my coffee and thought about how many versions of myself have been politely retired, thanked for their service, and escorted quietly out the side door. There’s a strange mercy in that anonymity. No grand villain, just ordinary fear wearing a name tag.
I thought about those versions of myself for a while. One of them could walk into a room and tell you, within thirty seconds, exactly what everybody else needed to do. He was especially gifted when nobody had asked. Another thought that if he could put the right words in the right order, every strained conversation would end with two reasonable people shaking hands. I miss that fellow sometimes. He put in long hours. He also mistook the sound of his own voice for evidence that something was getting done. Sitting there with a cold cup, I could almost hear him preparing a rebuttal.
I keep wanting clarity to arrive like a judge. It doesn’t. It arrives like weather, slow and unbothered. By the time you notice, you’re already wet and pretending you meant to be there.
What I wanted from clarity, if I’m honest, was a transcript with all my good lines underlined. I would point to one and say, See? That’s where I was trying. I could spend an entire afternoon making that case and still be surprised when the sun went down and the afternoon was gone. The hardest part was admitting how much of the argument I was having in an empty room. I knew what everybody would say, because I’d been doing all their parts. They were surprisingly easy to beat when I wrote their lines.
By September, I had spent nights in jail and weeks in treatment, and I came home still learning how to listen.
I don’t say much out loud anymore. Silence at least doesn’t subpoena you. Still, I catch myself rehearsing forgiveness like a speech I may never deliver. Not because they earned it, but because carrying it hurts more than setting it down. The old pride keeps lobbying for a retrial. The newer tiredness just wants sleep. Somewhere between those two, a thin hope survives like a pilot light no one remembers installing.
Some mornings forgiveness looks like setting the phone down before I compose the message. Some mornings it looks like picking it back up because there’s somebody I can call who will let me talk for a while and then ask whether I’ve eaten. I used to think that question was a change of subject. Lately I’ve begun to appreciate a person who can hear me lay out the whole history of the world and still remember I might need an egg. There is a kind of tenderness in being brought back to the size of your own kitchen.
I have asked God for answers in complete sentences, with supporting evidence and a reasonable turnaround time. I keep getting a morning. There is light on the counter and a cup that needs washing. There is a person I can be kind to before the day ends. Sometimes I get all the way through the first cup before I start trying to improve the terms of the arrangement. That’s progress by my standards. On better mornings, I open the Bible and let one line stay open beside me while I get on with the small business of being alive.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s annoyingly simple. You can’t out-argue what you’ve become. You can only outlast the noise. So I wait, not heroically, just honestly, which feels harder and holier than advertised.
— JC
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
— Psalm 46:10, KJV
