Way Back No. 13
One True Thing
If you love someone
right now,
here’s the practice.
And I’m asking you
to actually do it.
Say one true thing tonight
that the mask
would have handled.
Not the flood.
One thing.
“I’m scared about work.”
“I’ve been somewhere else lately.”
“I miss you,
and I don’t know
when that started.”
A few words of crack,
showing through the rock.
Then stay.
Don’t fix it.
Don’t perform around it.
Just let them meet
the real one.
I lost seven years
of no matter what,
protecting a woman
from the one thing
she’d already promised
to hold.
Don’t run my experiment.
The data’s in.
From chapter thirteen
What usually happens
The sentence sits in your mouth longer than you expect. The mask offers you five smoother versions. Say the rough one.
Then the hard part: staying. Not softening it, not joking it away. The other person usually meets you faster than you feared. That was the promise they made.
One line to carry
Then stay.
If someone came to mind
Some people read this page and think of one person the whole way through.
If that happened, send them back to themselves. It costs them nothing.
The other Ways Back are in their chapters, one per chapter, all of them free. This one is yours whenever you need it.