Still even during mundane Sunday nights in quiet small towns such as this, and even in the rigorous solitude and subduedness of the indecisive weeks between summer and autumn, I feel the kind of rage that I thought I could only get from playing with fire, back in the day. Even sitting here wrapped in this orange shawl, which I suspect is actually a cotton tablecloth, typing out phrases like “back in the day,” gives me a sense of fulfillment that I once thought was not going to come to me until much, much later.

It is the knowledge that there had been years before this. There had been moments before this moment. Hours before this hour. Seconds before this very second. It is this silent victory of knowing I have been through certain hardships I do not necessarily speak about; the knowledge that I have experienced life in doses larger than I usually care to ruminate on; the knowledge that I had been glued to certain surfaces I was certain I was never going to be able to recover from, only to find myself time after time that I have not only sundered from the nightmare but have also mastered the intricacy of choosing fragments of it and piecing them together to help me understand that which I never had the mental or emotional resources to in the past.

On most days, I admit that if I woke up one morning and found I had spontaneously grown wings on the curves of my back, I would fly to a place far, far away from here; somewhere warmer, somewhere louder, somewhere more alive; some place where I can dance as liberally as those around me do and create noise just as carelessly as I receive it. But on other days, like right now, such love for adventure and adrenaline is crippled by my equally irrepressible need for calmness and safety. I figured, maybe it is okay to feel excited about an early night, to feel stoked to have fresh sheets because I’m doing laundry on a Saturday night, to feel absolutely dumbstruck by the way a brand new tin can of cinnamon and chamomile tea bags caresses my whole existence. Maybe it is okay that I have moments when I feel like I could literally die and go to heaven at the sight of my family gathered in laughter at the dinner table.

I have always regarded myself as a dual-natured human being, and this duality had until recent memory proven more of a liability than a skill. But in embracing my ever-conflicting desires, I have learned to cope and thrive in ways no other thing or person could have helped me. In knowing that I can want two completely contrasting things, in knowing that life is both a circus and a poetry reading, that the world is both a stage and a grass field by a creek, that my body and my heart and my soul are both soldiers and children, and being okay with all of it… this must be what success is for me. Or at least a version of it I know I can sincerely comprehend and live with.

—

Written by Kenn Edward Tenorio

More by This Writer:

• When Someone Stops Loving You

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