In that memory, I’m alone, in a padded white room, yelling. My voice hits the walls and bounces back like a dull, dusty beanbag before dropping lifelessly to the floor.
I didn’t know my voice had so little weight. I didn’t realize how thoroughly it had been stripped from me. Piece by piece. Thread by thread.
I’d taken on their shame. Wrapped myself in it until it clung like plastic wrap around my throat.
The strangest part was that no one had disappeared. Everyone was still there. The same faces.
But somewhere along the way, they’d become strangers.
I know what it was like to look around and realize I no longer belonged. That wasn’t a movie. It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t some dramatic story I’d made up to explain the pain.
It was real.
There’s a particular grief that comes from discovering the people you’ve always known can become unfamiliar while they’re standing right in front of you.
It’s like mourning someone who is still alive.
The constant wondering: What happened? When did this change? Was it me? Was it them? Was it always this way and I just didn’t see it?
Maybe that is why my mind creates stories. Why I search for context. Why I hesitate before deciding I know the whole picture.
Later, I was driving down Stokes Store Road at forty-five miles an hour, enjoying the quiet. I was the only one on the road, surrounded by trees and the kind of country stillness that makes you forget the rest of the world exists.
Then I saw it. A turkey vulture standing in the road. Beside it was a large oak branch and a stiff squirrel lying on its back.
I immediately moved into the other lane, slowing down as my curiosity took over. What happened here? Had the turkey vulture swooped down from above? Was this some wild struggle between two creatures trying to survive?
My mind wandered to a story I’d read about a mountain goat and a cougar that both fell from a cliff after a fight, locked together until the very end.
Maybe it’s strange, but I like imagining the stories of creatures I pass. I don’t like reducing them to one moment. A dead squirrel. A predator. A victim. A villain.
I want to know what came before. I want the context. And maybe that is what I’ve always wanted for myself.
The truth is, people are complicated. We are messy. We hurt each other. We make mistakes. We carry wounds we don’t even realize are bleeding onto others.
But underneath all of that, there is still a whole person.
Maybe my work now is learning to offer that same curiosity inward that I so naturally offer outward.
To myself. To others. To all of us, trying to survive, trying to be understood, trying to be seen.
Love, Jaclynn