Stay Soft: Remaining Open When the Way is Shut
After a couple years of taking hits from life, I took the stage to share my thoughts on resilience and healing through work. I was nervous…
After a couple years of taking hits from life, I took the stage to share my thoughts on resilience and healing through work. I was nervous to be so raw, but I peppered my experiences through other talks and piqued attention with several of my images, particularly the one above. Without much prior explanation, this piece has been purchased, downloaded on lock screens, and celebrated as noteworthy just on the merits of looking beautiful. Somehow this resonates deeply, like a song in another language, and the curious know there’s more to unearth here than salt.
So many people came up to me after I stepped off the stage to ask how this storyline resolved. People want a neat, happy ending for me, or perhaps a cinematic story arc to believe in. I’ve had to tell them it never really ended because it barely began.
We meet many people over the course of our lives. Many pass through our timelines without notice. Some mirror our experience, reflecting us back to ourselves. You can feel the plaque of someone’s walls built up like a shell, but when you meet someone truly open, crystalline, it’s different. Your timeline reverberates with infinite possibility.
After the floods washed away camp, after clamoring to almost-safety a couple times, before the helicopters came in prehistoric blockbuster pomp to rescue us, I wrote a goodbye letter.
There is no clever article for choosing the right words in dire straights, for releasing someone without burdening them, nor prepping for the recourse those words might cause should you return home. I am proud of what I wrote, especially under duress. I urged him to be happy, saying “there’s no timeline or notice on danger, tragedy. You’re burning time… Please find a way to chase the best life” and thanked him for seeing me as I wished to be seen. I’d follow up briefly once completely safe.
Months before, I’d gifted him a favorite book of poetry, Salt, by Nayyirah Waheed, a cure-all for various levels of grief and heartache. My copy was well loved and notoriously dog-eared. When we finally met, I was still shaking, attempting an amiable break while bearing the worst of my post traumatic stress. Sitting on a park bench, he told me he tucked his favorite verse under his collar.
“Stay soft,” he murmured.
“It looks beautiful on you,” I concluded.
And then he walked away.
I have been raised to believe love is dynamic, an action to build and foster, to forge. Affection is earned through struggle, the parlance of my love has been laced with fire: hot, combative. In this example I have learned to battle, and struggled for loves less than deserving. I grappled to retain a robust love that eventually starved itself and fled like sand through my fingers. I have waged many wars, and I’m tired.
So I built. And I rebuilt. I twisted wire in my fingers and cried salt into the vat and grew letters slowly, carefully. The chemistry is easy, the details are as complicated as we make them. I bought roses and thistles; there’s always something pointed and sharp in the soft, beautiful things. I arranged them and re-grew a portion. The lesson was clear, and I didn’t want to mar it with my own delusions.
I could crystallize from this experience, become callous and angry in my abandonment. What purpose will this serve, save to redistribute my rage and raise my own floods? On the hardest days, strangers would approach me and call me out: I was glowing. They could see me fighting to keep my head above water, to remain buoyant, and they marveled.
“Stay soft,” they muttered. “It looks beautiful on you.”