Now

I am sick, sick, of no one understanding.
No one grasping the depth of my pain, no one realizing how much attention I need. Of no one rushing to love me in the wake of such an utterly selfish, immanently perilous statement.
No one understanding that my pain matters. It matters. It matters.
It matters.
My tears matter.
Every single one.
Every single breath: the ones hidden in quiet, the desperate ones I swallow so no one will hear, the long sighing lingering ones I wish someone would hear, the slow shuddering ones that starkly mark my aloneness, the gasping, tearing ones that no one ever hears. All those--someone should hear.

Everyone should be heard. Everyone should have someone who follows their every move, their every breath, who treasures every singe stupid, precious, priceless tear as if it was the blood of Heaven.

Every stumbling statement, every denial that is a secret cry for help.
Every cold shrug and achingly awkward expression--the flimsy but amazingly convincing proofs that I don't care, that it doesn't matter to me whether you care or not. I am so tired of no one knowing they only mean Please love me anyway, don't let me prove one more time that I am worth so little I can make you push me away with my own blank glance.

I am tired of the ones who should know not knowing.
Of the ones who have what I want not understanding enough to give it.
Of the ones who understand not having the chance in my heart or in years to offer it.

I am tired of no one knowing that my running is an invitation to pursuit. That my fight is a bleeding cry for embrace.
That the wretchedness I offer to your ears is the very best I have to give, the treasure of my heart, the pearls I've cast time after time after time after time into emptiness.
That although it is wretched it is beautiful because it is the most of me,
it is the chance to pierce the most secret place and shatter the lies and unlock the place of Beautiful.
The pearls I've thrown into nothing, which, altho pitiful and filthy with self, should be a higher sacrifice, offered to One who knows their worth.

I am tired of myself, of my obsession with the circles of my inability to break out of the madness. Bound by an unclear demand
that it all matters, that it should be given, that I am utterly at fault and utterly, inherently created to demand the impossible
and risk everything--reputation, dignity, self itself--on the chance of finding it.

I am too tired to do it again.
Yet I am weak enough to circle again if I could.
And I can't.

So I will throw my wretched pearls to a higher altar and say outrageous, audacious things to a God to Whom I have no right to raise my face.

And I will spend my life, such selfish hours as pain motivates, in pursuit of such a Love.
If I walk alone, I walk alone.
If I waste my name and my flimsy guards of presentability in hapless tries for lesser imitations along the way, so be it.
Because I am given an unsure Hope, a strongly, unlikely-felt surge that there will be no more desert circles like the last,
that this last desperate effort will win the Mirage of Solid Love.

Arms Wide Open, Misty Edwards