He’s smart.
Not that I’m not smart, we’re simply…different smart.
He’s the boring kind ofinvest wisely and have a backup plansmart.
I’mknow how to get yourself out of trouble when it inevitably comes callingsmart.
We’re opposite smart.
Though it was definitely smart to tell him all of that.
Because my own breathing is evening out, and I’m feeling better for having said it to someone out loud.
“Are you going to tell people who you really are?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“I wish no one had known who I was.”
“Why?”
“There’s freedom in being nobody. No expectations to live up or down to. It took a long time for me to figure out how to accept that there will always be expectations, but that doesn’t mean I can’t justbe. The only expectations that matter are my own. Not anyone else’s.”
It’s a great sentiment that I’m still trying to put into practice, and it will never be entirely true.
Bea’s expectations matter because she matters.
I asked her one time how she could tolerate me when I felt like a disaster more or less every day.
And she told me she was a disaster herself, so I made her feel less alone.
I didn’t believe her. I still think I was one more stressor in her life when she didn’t need so much as the toilet to flush wrong a single time or the power to flicker during a thunderstorm.
But now, now that I’m making it mostly on my own in ways I never thought I was capable of—now I get it.
It’s normal to feel like a disaster even when the world tells you that you should keep your shit together.
It’s normal to feel like you’ll never get ahead of the issues that pop up and that you’ll never handle them with the right kind of grace and humor and proficiency that social media and the world tell us we should.
We’re in this together.
She’s my anchor, and I believe her now when she tells me I’m hers too.
And that’s enough for now. As enough as it can be with all of my other worries about Margot one day abandoning me too.
Oliver’s staring at me in the darkness. Even if it were completely pitch black, I’d know.
He gives intense scrutiny.
He didn’t use to. But he does here.
“That’s unexpectedly helpful,” he finally says.
He doesn’t addthank you.
Boring old Oliver would’ve.
But this Oliver doesn’t.
