Every Word You Cannot Say

by Iain S. Thomas

  who you are.

  (Unless you take care of you, and give yourself love.

  Unless you meet yourself, inside yourself.

  Unless you know yourself like you were meant to.

  Forgive yourself for being you—

  you have done nothing wrong and tomorrow is

  another chance.

  I swear, there is a day after, every day.)

  Who could say,

  “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.)

  So pray to the God of everything that heals

  —there is a temple in our hands when we hold

  them together.

  Because:

  No one will ever tell you how great you can be.

  You will never be asked to do something incredible with your life.

  You will never get a letter in the mail that says,

  “Dear you, please, do something important with your time.”

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

  You are your fear and your love and you are the embodiment of all the things you feel.

  Only you hold you back, or push you forward.*

  *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.”

  And our gut reaction when we hear the monster say these things, is to run.

  But if we are the monster, and the person being chased, then we need to stop running because we cannot run away from ourselves.

  You need to stop running, turn around and—hug—the monster. Because you are the monster. And the hero—the person running.

  And everything between them.

  You need to pull the monster close and whisper in its ear, no matter how scared you are, no matter how ugly the monster seems on the outside, no matter how much you think you can’t, and say:

  “You are good enough.

  I’m sorry you’re afraid.

  You deserved to be loved the way you want to be loved.

  There is nothing in you that needs to be fixed.

  The thing you’ve been looking for, has been Here, with you, all along.

  I am sorry I ran away from you. I am sorry you’re afraid. I love you, honestly and sincerely, without end.”

  How?

  Living is easy, you just look for the good in

  the blades of grass

  between your toes.

  (Remember what I said: Listen for the poem.)

  You just try and find something in everything, a myriad of colors exploding outward from the center, and if you open up your heart, it looks like unstirred paint in there, it looks like someone loved you long ago and forgot to stop loving you, even though you expected them to.

  It looks like a way to be,

  when there’s no way left to be.

  Because what else could you be,

  but everything.

  So go forward

  into bright light,

  if you love hard enough,

  your feet leave the ground

  and you just kind of hang in the air

  and that feels good, so love, because love is good,

  because it feels like you’re floating.

  Maybe, in the story of your life, someone

  has written:

  You cannot say why you loved them.

  Only that you did.

  Only that you don’t anymore.

  But you cannot see the parts of you that shine when you’re not looking, because all you see when you look at yourself is the picture other people have painted for you.

  And that’s not who you are.

  You are the picture you paint, of you.

  (You are still everything you could be.)

  There, in the dream, you ask:

  How?

  How?

  Break every vow that hurts you.

  Take every opportunity.

  Light all fires.

  Turn all keys.

  How?

  They’ll say,

  “We can make miles if we hold our breaths and dive beneath the sheets together, we can make it all the way there and back if you trust me.

  We can make it somewhere good.

  Trust me when I say I love you like the light in

  autumn loves the leaves, like a wave loves the sand, like good loves bad, like everything we can still be

  to each other.”

  How?

  Pray for being aware that you’re not waiting for anything and everything you are, you are.

  Pray for being awake to every good thing.

  Pray to the best parts of you.

  How?

  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.

  How?

  You love again.

  Recycle your heart.

  Someone out there needs it.

  —Remember this.

  Wait:

  1.Have you told the people you love that you love them?

  2.Have you gotten out of bed?

  3.Have you drunk enough water?

  4.Have you read something that wasn’t on a screen?

  5.Have you taken a moment to remember how important you are to you?

  Given enough time,

  every building collapses,

  every flower turns to ash,

  every candle burns out,

  every name must be forgotten.

  This is not sad.

  “Tell me about your silence.”

  It’s a silence so big you could swim in it and blow up bubbles from the bottom of it.

  A silence so big it’d swallow you whole.

  A silence so big, if you listen hard enough,

  you can hear it roar.

  “Let’s talk about it another time.”*

  *If I’m honest, sometimes I feel like we’ve been trying to find each other in every life before this one, and this is as close as we’ve ever gotten. And I know now that we have to try again because we fucked this up. Maybe we won’t even be born on the same continent next time, or the time after that, and we’ll just spend those lives searching for something we can’t find, miserable for reasons we will never understand. Until we get to try again. Until we somehow find each other in another life.

  “What do I do?”

  Be in the middle of every good thing.

  Be in the middle of blue eyes, of green grass, of clear rain.

  Be in the middle of red fire, be the good voice that asks for

  peace and love.

  I know:

  Sometimes, you think you don’t

  deserve goodness.

  But, I promise you,

  we all have things

  we think we don’t deserve.

  You deserve all the goodness you can get.

  So:

  Go find a pen

  that only writes good things

  about you,


  go find the paper that hears it,

  go find the person who loves you for who you are and wouldn’t change a single hair on your body, go find the God of good deeds in the tips of a flower’s petals,

  go find the God of good conversation

  at the edge of a tea mug,

  go find yourself in the strange place

  where all things live,

  go find a way to be like dust in

  light, suspended above the

  carpet, go find a new way to be that doesn’t make you feel like you’re trying to be

  anything at all.

  Take a moment, now, to be conscious of

  what you’re doing with your time.

  If you intend to waste it, that’s fine,

  just be aware that you’re wasting it.

  Do not confuse being in the same room,

  with spending good time with another

  human being.

  Do not confuse the distractions of the world,

  with the world itself.

  A silent bell is ringing.

  Because every beautiful thing

  is only Here when you are.

  Please:

  Do the hard work of being aware of the world around you, and what you think of it.

  Take charge of your mind.

  Silence your own critics but pay attention to harsh, good advice.

  And listen to the kindest voice in your head.

  Listen.

  Here is what else I know about sadness.

  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.§

  § “Keep away from me.”

  “Just one more.”

  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.

  But the correct response to pain, is self-love.

  When we’re hurt, we need to take better care of ourselves. Not worse.

  It can be hard to be conscious in the moment and remember to be kind to ourselves when someone hurts us. But you need to try.

  Please.

  Try.

  You are the person who asks who they are.

  You are a wonderer.

  A searcher.

  You are the person who asks who they are.

  It’s only the idea that everyone else KNOWS who they are that’s causing you pain.

  But no one knows who they really are.

  You are an overflowing river that shifts its banks when the rains come.

  That’s why you cannot hold on to who you are.

  And there is great joy in finding yourself every single day and saying in your own voice:

  “I know who I am. I am the one that looks for me. And every single day, I find me again. I find myself in the things I do and the things I notice. I find myself in crowds and in solitude. I find myself in quiet moments and at the top of tall mountains. I find myself in the tips of waves, in forests, and in the books I read.

  I find myself in leaves and rain and old photos.

  Every single day, I find me again.”

  And if you find someone with a head made of colors and a heart made of secrets, try to love them like they need to be loved.

  About being anything:

  There are days when everyone needs you to be strong, even if you’re dying inside, and you can only cry when

  no one’s looking because you’re petrified of letting

  them down.

  And I know you know:

  It can be so incredibly hard, just to be.

  And hate?

  Often, we hate people not because they have wronged us, but because they have reminded us of some secret part of ourselves that we don’t like.

  Maybe, making peace with the world starts with

  making peace with ourselves.

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

  And while your anger can be useful,

  you have no duty to it.

  There is no register in the sky keeping track of whether or not you got angry as many times as you were

  supposed to.

  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.

  Not everyone wins the lottery,

  but everyone who does

  bought a ticket.

  To live the life you want,

  you have to be brave

  and buy the ticket every single day.

  Because there is a God of moments

  and he passes quickly,

  you have to be ready to pray to him,

  even for little things.

  And we must be gardeners

  of all the things we find in our hearts.

  And we are only alive in the moments where we either overcome or forget the everyday fear that we are not who we tell people we are.

  And

  And

  And

  And

  And

  And

  And

  And

  Remember:

  Living the life you want,

  after you live the life you have,

  doesn’t actually work.

  And now?

  Show me how you tell someone that the thought of them spreads like a warm river through your soul, until it leaves through the eyes.

  How do you tell someone that you would do everything

  for them.

  How do you explain that there is no greater force in the universe than the love you have in your heart for them.

  How do you tell them that you know now why you’re Here.

  Show me the words you would use, to try and say these things I cannot say.

  And I will say them all.

  This page is Here to tell you that it’ll be ok.

  This page is Here for every time you were told you cannot do it, to tell you that you can.

  This page is Here for every time you weren’t told anything at all.

  So many people don’t know:

  People come with instruction booklets written on their eyelids and they try and tell you the things that make them work, and about what breaks them, about how to carry them, but the world doesn’t listen, and we put people who shouldn’t be in water in water, and we use the wrong batteries and we leave them on too long and we cry when we lose them, aloud,

  “Oh if only we’d known,

  if only we’d listened.”

  Don’t worry, time must pass, even in the

  moments when it feels like it can’t, or shouldn’t.

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything.”*

  We all intend to be perfect but

  none of us are.

  If only we could all see each other as we

  intended to be, instead of as who we are.

  And we’re not everything we could be,

  because we’re afraid to allow ourselves to exist all at once,

  because too many people have told us not to.

  So try to carry on

  picking the right strings on the guitar,

  painting the right colors,

  we don’t know what they are,

  we just kno
w there are good songs

  that haven’t been written yet.

  There is a child somewhere right now who

  doesn’t know that they will

  shake the world

  with everything they have to give.

  There is someone trying

  one more time,

  and then giving up,

  not knowing that they still had to

  try one more time after that.

  There is someone in all of us.

  Here.

  Here.

  Here.

  And you cannot hide your heart forever.

  This is true of other people too.

  Whether pure or impure, the heart shines through.

  Give anyone long enough, and they will tell you

  what is in their heart.

  This is what the stranger you loved