11… Phrases I Wish I Could Say

Words are my craft. I’m decent with them. They’re familiar. A lifetime has been spent honing this talent.

Feelings are my downfall. I’m terrible with them. They’re consuming and distracting and difficult to categorize. A lifetime has been spent trying to untangle the knot that other people seem to so easily figure out.

One of my greatest fears is being misunderstood, so I trend toward verbosity. Over explaining ideas, feelings, myself in writing because I want people to understand what I’m trying to say. And I prefer it in writing because I’m truly not good at processing feelings or thoughts on the spot, so I like the time I can take with the written word and the kindness it gives me in the form of editing. We can thank a lot of childhood trauma for this, among other things. 

I feel like I don’t belong to the same world everyone else does. I don’t understand them, and they don’t understand me. Like there are walls keeping us apart. Except each wall has a one way mirror that I can look through to observe the world and figure out how to exist in it, but no one quite understands the way I work or how to fit into my own. So even though I trend toward verbosity, more often than not, I say nothing at all. 

Everytime I start to speak, explain. To let people into my world. To share the emotions I feel so viscerally. It’s too much. Time and time again, I’ve learned it’s easier to just keeping looking through the one way mirror. To exist quietly in the background of the world everyone else enjoys. To make do with the one I have all to myself.

Normally, I contextualize everything. But I don’t feel like doing that because I’ve never liked doing that. I’m blunt, but I’ve softened my edges to make the world more comfortable. So here are eleven things I wish I could say, but I don’t. 

1. I miss you. Every moment of every day. I never truly knew what it felt to miss someone until I woke up without you and missed you. I wish I didn’t. I wish I wished to forget you; it would make all of this easier. But I know I’ll keep missing you until the day I can no longer miss anything at all. But I’d rather miss you than not know what missing you feels like.  
2. Don’t touch me.
3. I love you. I will always love you. 
4. I wish I weren’t gay. (I will clarify this only so far as: I LOVE being gay, and truly wouldn’t change it for the world, but it lead to an ending of a story I hoped would have no ending.)
5. I deserve better.
6. Help.
7. I’m meant for more.
8. Please don’t give up.
9. See me. 
10. There is only so much I can take without breaking.
11. No.