By Hannah Jamieson
You are often an unwelcome thing.
Cursed and hated and villainized in every conceivable way. You are written and made into something evil by the world around you, born of their fear. They tell tales of you that you’ve never heard until they’re twisted beyond repair. They believe they see you for what you are and know what they would see the day you came to their side to collect. You know they are wrong.
You never look the same, changing every second of every moment, inconsequential and monumental. Sometimes you are horrifying, a sight that can never be forgotten, no matter the effort. Sometimes you are gentle and embraced by those you come to. Sometimes you are early. Sometimes you are late. And yet, you are always on time. You always catch up. Always punctual and always someone new, a constant and unending rebirth. With every breath you do not breathe, you change because your only consistency is that you come and that you lead someone by the hand and that someone sees you differently than the person before him. In every heartbeat you do not have, you are hated because you are that thing they have learned to hate because all you do is take and take and take.
You do not cry when they beg you to wait and to hold on. You do not cry when they smile at you softly and reach for your hand. You do not cry when you embrace them, finally allowing them to rest from it all. You cannot cry because crying takes time and you do not have time because by the time you have finished leading, you are someone else again and there is a new person crying. You cannot cry because it does not matter if you do—after all, who would want you, of all the wretched things, to cry for them? All you can do is change and take and hold because that is who you are.
And, even with all you are, you cannot deny that you take.
No matter the kindness the person you come for believes you to be, you are taking them and you are taking them somewhere very difficult to follow. However, you realize that people only say that you take when it is someone good. You take when they are loved or seen as bright. It’s not taking if another hates them. It’s not taking if they are cold and cruel, and while you see the logic in this, you believe that every time you go through that miserable metamorphosis, you take.
Every single time, you take.
You take everything. You take saints. You take sinners. You take the whole. You take the damaged. You take outcasts and best friends and the lonely and the full and you take them far, far away. You take everything and embrace it in your arms as your own. You are the one thing in this world that will always find a place for someone within your arms and within yourself. Because you are the one truth of the world and if you won’t open your arms to the healed and the hurting and the blessed and the damned, then there is no truth at all.
And it is moments like this where you wish you could cry so that those you take know that at least one person weeps for them and the spirit they hold, even if many believe they do not deserve it. It is the only kindness you wish you could give, but there is no time for you to embrace them. They are gone and you are new again and you cannot cry.
You do not cry.
You just watch and discover your solace in watching something new be born of the absence you left. You let yourself find warmth in something rising from the ashes you carry in your wake—a sprout in the soil of a forest scorched. Just as you are reborn, so are those you take. And that is your only relief in this world that wishes you gone.
Sometimes, you too wish you were gone.
Sometimes, you wish they understood why you must take and leave space.
But you must ask the question: would they even listen if you told them? Would they want to hear the words of someone who hurts them in the way only you can—in the way you do? You are afraid to say that you think they would not. It does not matter your reason for it, you think.
Because you are often an unwanted and unwelcome thing. And unwanted things do not get reasons or excuses.
And in this hollow space of yours, you feel the tug of something new pulling at your current form and it is time again. So you follow the thread into a room of people who have never hated you more than in this moment and yet who have never seen you. Here, in this second of time, you see that you are something ephemeral and soft. You are not jagged or sharp or something monstrous, but something light and natural, yet inevitable—as you always are.
And then they see you and you see them, and they smile at you and tell you with it that they are ready. You almost hesitate. You reach out your hand for them to hold. They do.
You take.
You do not cry.