One day you will sit in a taxi, one person removed from the only person you know who barely knows you in spite of knowing it all. You will sit there quiet, holding your tears, minding your thoughts, wondering why you dismantled everything, determining that you will pay now, that you will be punished once and for all for needing everything to change, for wanting everything to be different.

It’s a familiar and hateful complaint, the one you make against yourself, only this time, as you rehearse your lines and say your part again and again, there will be a song and a man saying one word over and over again on the radio. You will decide this once (for reasons you still cannot comprehend) to suspend judgment on yourself and everyone else and accept the totality of it all, that you made a choice, that you suffered for deciding and then suffered more by questioning the decision. You will listen to that song and those words and follow the truth down to the root where you will find yourself, your original unknowable self, and you will decide once and for all to accept every bit of it. The truth, the consequences, the choice, the wishing and all the dreams dashed and then come true.

This you will do as an act of mercy on yourself, but not yourself only. You will do it as a way to make a path forward. You will do it as an act of contrition, of humility. As a way of knowing you are a rare thing of beauty on the earth and at the same time–flawed, failing, damaged, human.

The song will end, but not before you hold these particular tears one last time. Not before you feel them and then swallow them down and plant them like seeds by still waters, establishing the very foundation of a tree that will offer you shade and shelter and comfort for many years to come.

Take it easy, she told you, a hundred times, a hundred days before, and now, for the first time you will know what she meant. You will turn your mind in one moment from the tears or the tree to simple things, to the baby sitting in front of you, to the boy leaning into you, sitting on the hem of your dress. You will do all this in your own small way and feel the burden lift, just as she did, so many times before, when the rain fell on her back in the homeless fields of Uganda. Just as she did for so many years after, when the machete failed to cut her down. When she decided it was better to laugh, better to breathe, better to live.

Better to love herself, than to let the tears fall in contempt or damnation.

Untitled from jen lemen on Vimeo.