BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST, THAN...

I made a promise once
to become easier to understand
and harder to misunderstand others.
It was not quite a promise to be good.
Good is a word people use
when they want the accounting to be simple.
I wanted something more difficult.
I wanted to learn the particular grammar
of the people I loved—
which silences meant leave me alone,
which meant please notice,
when help was a pair of hands
and when it was the discipline
of keeping mine to myself.
I wanted to stop mistaking
what I knew how to give
for what another person needed.
So I studied.
I studied apology.
I studied grief.
I studied the thousand disguises of fear.
I learned that anger sometimes arrives
wearing somebody else's name.
That reassurance given too late
can sound like an argument.
That some people need a witness,
some need a door held open,
some need you to sit on the floor beside them
and resist the unbearable urge
to make anything better.
I wrote some of it down.
At first, only for myself.
A record of the person
I was trying to become.
A way of making the promise difficult to deny later
when keeping it became inconvenient.
Because I knew myself well enough
to know that conviction is easiest
before it costs anything.
And eventually
it cost something.
Of course it did.
There were people I learned carefully
who still misunderstood me.
People whose language I practiced
until my mouth hurt
who would not speak mine.
There were times I arrived
with exactly what I had been asked to carry
and found the house empty.
There were times I stayed too long
because I had confused endurance with devotion.
Times I did too much.
Times the kindest thing available to me
was restraint,
and I had to learn that too.
I learned that love is not made purer
by exhausting the person giving it.
I learned that leaving
can require as much care as staying.
I learned that understanding someone
does not obligate me to survive them.
None of this was in the first draft
of the promise.
Neither was the part
where doing everything carefully
still sometimes ends badly.
That was an expensive amendment.
There is no arrangement of tenderness
that guarantees tenderness in return.
No fluency so perfect
that nobody can choose not to hear you.
No amount of deliberate living
that prevents the accidental thing
from entering through an unlocked afternoon
and changing the shape of everything.
People leave.
People die.
People become strangers
while their coffee is still in your cupboard.
Bodies betray their tenants.
Homes empty.
Dogs grow gray around the mouth.
There are roads you drive every day
until one day you drive them
for the last time
without knowing to look around.
There are versions of yourself
you will never be able to visit again.
Loss has never needed love's permission.
This is the part I keep returning to.
People tell you, after enough of it,
to become careful.
They usually mean smaller.
Give less.
Expect less.
Need less.
Let fewer things reach the soft machinery.
And perhaps it works.
Perhaps there is a life
in which I perfect the art
of having nothing left to take.
I don't think I want it.
Not because I have mistaken pain
for proof that something mattered.
Pain has never needed
that kind of encouragement.
But because I have noticed
that loss is remarkably resourceful.
It finds us anyway.
It takes years.
It takes places.
It takes the familiar shape of a room
after the furniture has been moved.
It takes people we never thought
we would have to practice remembering.
Even without love,
there would still be things
I could not keep.
And if I am going to lose things anyway,
I cannot understand making a life
with less love in it
just to give grief fewer names.
I would rather know the names.
I would rather have known
how someone takes their coffee,
what makes them go quiet,
which story they tell differently
when they are tired.
I would rather learn
that one person wants questions
and another wants company
without having to explain themselves.
I would rather know
who needs the light left on.
There is so much about another person
that can only be learned
by considering them worth the study.
And I do.
God, I do.
Not everyone.
That has never been the promise.
But when I choose someone,
when I make room for them
inside the small and deliberate country
of my life,
I want to learn the roads.
I want to know where not to drive.
I want to know which doors stick,
which floorboards announce you,
where they keep the extra blankets,
what they mean when they say
I'm fine
and, just as importantly,
when they simply mean
I'm fine.
I want to become fluent enough
not to translate everything
back into myself.
And I will get it wrong.
There are languages
I will never speak without an accent.
There will be days
when I bring comfort
to someone who needed space,
days when I mistake silence
for an invitation to fill it,
days when all my careful learning
still leaves me standing there
with the wrong thing in my hands.
The promise was never
to become impossible to fail.
It was to remain teachable.
To let someone tell me
that isn't how you love me
without answering
but look how hard I tried.
To understand that effort
is not the same thing as accuracy.
To change.
To remember.
To try differently next time.
And maybe that is all
I have ever meant
by leaving nothing accidental.
Not perfection.
Not some impossible tenderness
that always knows what to do.
Just attention.
The willingness to learn
the shape of another person
without insisting
they resemble me.
To let knowing them
change the way I know how to care.
To keep some record
of what I have learned
and remain willing
to revise it.
There are easier ways
to move through the world.
I know.
But I have never wanted
to become untouched by it.
I want a life that leaves evidence
of having been lived among people.
Their words in my vocabulary.
Their recipes in my kitchen.
Their names attached to songs
and streets
and stupid jokes
I will never be able to explain correctly.
The particular ways
I have learned to be gentle
because once,
someone needed gentleness
in exactly that form.
What a privilege, really,
to be changed
by having known someone.
To carry forward
some small instruction
their existence gave me
for how to meet the next person
a little more carefully.
So I will keep learning.
I will keep asking.
I will keep becoming
someone capable of loving people
more particularly
than I did before.
Not because I expect
to master it.
There are too many languages
and I have only one life.
But I have one.
And while I am here,
I would like to spend it
getting better
at saying
I see you
in as many ways
as I can.