Here are the things I don’t want anyone else to know. Here is the person I don’t anyone else to see.

When I was younger I dreamed a hermit’s life for myself. Cottage in the woods, a shelf of books, a lone stranger knocking on my door and I do not answer. They are lost and I make like a ghost. Like a vapor of water. I am younger and I am always making a ghost of myself. I trace the outline I might take up if I could not be seen.

My heart seized at the thought of asking an employee a question. I was in the way of a man browsing books in the library and could not wring myself any smaller. My mother asked if I wanted to attend a writing club and I loved writing but could not, could not, be in a room full of people’s eyes tracing my being, each unique soul turned in sharp thought toward my own. I shook my head around a silent wish and cried, later, fists pale-tight around all I wasn’t.

They have kind eyes and soft smiles. At the end of class we push the desks back together, a chore turned ritual, and I thank them for their responses to a poem. We all walk the same way and start chatting (I beg my heart to slow, to be less strange, to live in the cold air and the words living around me). When they invite me to coffee I thank everything I can on that walk to starbucks. I thank the pavement and the clouds and the thick-soled boots I’m wearing. I thank the creaking of my ribs that has grown so quiet after so long.

I like to say, I have learned to do hard things. I’ve learned to speak up, to barge into unfamiliar territory and declare that there are things that I want and pursue them. I’ve embraced failure. I’ve learned to be alone. Sometimes the hard thing is sending an email, or ordering fries. Sometimes it is sitting by a person and being a person, small laughter and conversation freeing all the weight you learned only from yourself, watching it drift to and fro. There are hard things, and there are hard things. Sometimes I have to learn to breathe.

Later, I ask a small question and she gives a big answer and while she talks I wish I could reach out with my words and tell her that I can never understand, but I understand, and I am listening. Instead I just listen and while we are walking we get lost and the weather is cold, the sun blotted by clouds, the wind blowing right through us. I am the only one of us who know the way but didn’t bother to ask where we are going. We trudge through half melted snow and are too cold to talk.

I learn that fear is not diminishing. It lives in the same shape as the air. The same shape as you. You move, and it moves in a delayed shadow. Like an afterimage. The burning of a light that is no longer light darkened in your vision.

Even after I lose us, lose the perfect words, after we shiver under bone-white sky, she still smiles. She learns I am not so good at directions, that I leave buildings out of opposite doors, thoughtless. Learns I am practiced in listening, but try still to give words as well as silence. Learns I am afraid of endings, but never let that stop me from attempting to grow beginnings.

I failed once, to put a word to everything. When I saw a word and thought it was mine, I took it home and felt the air of how it might explain my fears in one long string of letters. I cried when I realized it didn’t belong to me. Instead I learned I was an unexplained, strange thing. That there was nothing I could hold onto when my body compressed itself as it realized that to exist it would have to be perceived.

What is lost when heavy things rise, like an anchor strung onto a light blue balloon? Up, up, up, so easily, it feels like falling. Like the wind could laugh and blow it all away.

When outside, my eyes move towards the clouds, almost on instinct. They draw me in, their defined edges, the bits of them that fade into the space around them. You would never know from looking that they are heavy bastards. That they can weigh billions of pounds, all water vapor, particles, and air. The only reason they remain hovering above everything is because they are slightly less dense than the air beneath them. There is nothing weightless in their towering construction.

Not too long ago my fears held themselves in the cavern of my mouth and the emptiness that filled my chest when it asked for more. After being afraid so long it feels like nothing at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing. A bubble of air expanding in my lungs, blocking the way to my throat. I smile easily but my eyes are transparent things. I close them when I am alone.

Process

This personal essay started with a Google Doc and a list of great lines that my peer, Nyilah, and I have seen or heard. “I’m afraid you’ll end up seeing me the way I see myself” ended up on the list (props to Nyilah!), and we decided to use it as both a prompt and shared title. I started off with a timed free write that really set up the framework for this essay, although it looked much different than this finished piece.

After getting some of those ideas on the page, Nyilah and I made some more time for writing in another one of our meetings. I worked on it a bit outside of that as well. Eventually, there were a whole lot of words on the page, and that meant that my next job was reorganizing, cutting down, rewriting, and refining those words. After many drafts, and lots of insightful feedback from Nyilah, I finally felt that everything worked together exactly the way I wanted it to.