The Dust of Our Bones: Pt. 1

It’s on his birthday that I see her: a small comma of a woman, providing a pause in the long run-on sentence of my life. There’s a way about her. A way that makes you feel like you’re good where you are; makes you feel like you’re not the odd-one-out you always thought you were.

And I keep reflecting on that feeling I got as she rang up mine and my brother’s cigars. Because it just so happens that that emotion, that unnameable thing, falls in my lap in the middle of a lot of goddamn questions.

I don’t know her name. To me, she’s known only as the friendly face behind the counter at the smoke shop. I had only been there once before and a plume of discomfort had swelled in my belly the moment I had stepped through the doors. The very aura of the smoke shop seemed to wrap around me in a shameful, dusky spotlight, illuminating that thing that isn’t supposed to be there. I don’t belong in here and it’s obvious. I briefly comment to my brother that it makes me feel uncomfortable. He thinks it is because this sweet girl raised in a conservative, Christian home is feeling judgmental of these people who seem so drastically different than she is.

I tell myself this is the reason, too, and beat myself up for not being as kind and open and easygoing as my brother who truly knows no stranger.

But I wander back there again, grab my favorite cigar off the shelf, and see her. She’s wearing pajamas, her dyed blond hair falling stringy around shoulders that are confident. She has a nose ring and a slight gap in her teeth, noticeable only because of her genuine smile that greeted me. Her friendliness made me feel at ease. And there was this moment at the register where I felt as though I had as much right to be there as the next guy.

It dawned on me as I drove home on dusty backroads: I do not judge them. I envy them. They have something I crave so desperately, something I think about over and over as I lay in bed at night. This way of just not giving a fuck, of being who you are and doing what you want.

My whole life I have leaned my ear to the expectations of others and listened intently. Gathering what I needed to know to be loved, I hacked my soul and flesh until it fit. My heart is strung up with the wires of other’s expectations—so squelched, so small, I fear that it does not even know what it is anymore. So marred, so disfigured by what I feel will make me lovable, it has forgotten its original form and beat and rhythm.

How do people know the sound of their own voice? If I dared let my voice out of its cage, would I recognize the sound that landed softly back on my ears? Or would it be strange to me, as unfamiliar as a language I do not know?

Perhaps. But my fingers wrap tenderly around a truth: although the language is unknown, it is beautiful. How often do I find myself leaning in to listen to a conversation I do not understand? Maybe I can lean into my own voice with the same dauntless curiosity that drives us all to learn.

She inspires me, that girl in the smoke shop, so beautiful and bright and welcoming. I felt as though I did not fit and she made me feel as though I did and that’s a new wave to a soul that’s stalled.

I ask—what would life be to know the dust of our bones, to know who we are beyond doubt or shadow or fear? I want to know mine. And so, I begin a challenge to myself: to step outside the confounds of my own comfort that I might breathe. To lean in a little harder, bravely following my voice whenever it echos. To disengage from all platforms that give me a list before giving me a hug and to learn to embrace myself and people in whatever shade or shape we are.

It will be a journey of connection, a process of unlocking my jaw and letting those oscillating octaves of wonder float out into a universe that has been waiting for them.

So to the girl behind the counter that gave me a hint that maybe I am worth showing up in my own damn life, thank you. Maybe one day we can catch up and I’ll tell you who I am—as soon as I find out who the hell that is.