“It is possible for everybody to be mad.” CJ quietly said.

I am reflective, I think. I am reflective. I think. I remember as a child, before I went to secondary school, I must have been about eight and managed to recount in an argument, a litany of previous hurts inflicted by the same person. I shared these in the hearing of my father. He woke me up early the next morning, a sadness sculpting his face and said, “You don’t behave like other children. You don’t forget things. Why don’t you let go?” Those words haunted me, they harried, harassed me. I wanted, desperately, to be like other children, to let go with the lightness of tiny fingers too delicate to grasp, to cling on to the magnified matter that is trouble, that is stress. I found, I find, instead, that I have always been like this. Insular, pensive, considering the actions of others, critical of my actions and inactions. I find myself stiflingly self-assessing.

I tried to trace the origin of that oddity even in childhood. In my reading, I find that trauma can do this. I am currently, briefly away from my son for work, and I hear about the desperate way he clings to my husband uncertain of the world, sure only of this chocolate man who answers his loud cries for “Daddy”. Trauma, big or small- for who is to say what warrants large trauma in a toddler’s tiny universe? Trauma, can make a child hold on to the familiar, the safe. Digging calcium-empowered nails into the fleshy fat of the present, of the recent past, terrified of the unknown tomorrow. Trauma can make one remember the minuscule details of the said…and the unspoken. It heightens the senses, in proof that evolution never stopped for the brain. Children whose senses have been forced to sharpen by circumstances, have mutated minds, minds able to amplify minute elements of life and bring the same to ready remembrance. So, I’d hoard, unconsciously, actions, reactions, perceived slights and express omissions, careful in self-protection. A skill I have, sadly, sharpened all my life.

Then, I met CJ. There is a small liberation when you find a witness to your life. It is a weird assurance of your safety. When I gossip with my husband for instance, I never think of it as telling someone else a secret. Because, he feels like an extension of myself.

Sometimes in this convoluted journey of life, we meet people who are our other selves. Those that not only accept us, they get us. Our quirks and finesses are clear to them…yet, they don’t explain them away. Instead they understand this our intrinsic need to create fantasies, build walls, wear costumes, hoard and stack memories tight to chest. They don’t judge us for these.

They pry our fingers apart, gently asking “Let me see your cards?” And when you think you dare not, they play their trump, “I’ll show you mine.” And mine makes you want to reach out and comfort them, tell them you understand, as you realize that each heart hides its hurts. You reach out to show you understand, and in this singular act of mutual comfort, your arms leave your chest. Arms tightly wound around your ribs, shielding your heart, gently untangle, open, revealing your own cards.

That is how it feels to be loved.

So much of my husband was so different from my shuttered, sheltered existence, my experience of the world, expectations for my life. Yet, everything different was at the surface. At the base, he understood me and I saw him.

And that changed everything.

So when he said to me, “Everyone can be mad”, I understood he meant that just the two of us, you and me Obi’m, can see a thing in a different way.

And that is ok.