Episode 6: This is a Safe Space to Write
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be. Today’s poem brings us into a relationship between someone struggling and a friend they find support in speaking with. Because these two people don’t live close to one another—and haven’t met in person—the friend has offered their text chain as a space to write, share, be vulnerable, and journal, even if the friend isn’t always able to reply. This poem is in the voice of the person struggling, who shares their honest, co-existing gratitude for and complicated wrestle with this dynamic.
I’ll share it with you now:
Thoughts orbit—
planets alienated from one another,
looping ancient wreathes
around a burning,
untouchable star,
unable to graze each other.
Can’t write them without breaking
down. Can’t break
down because can’t
put myself back together
alone.
You said I could write here, anytime.
That the capacity—at any given moment to
read, hold, digest, and respond to my words—
is your boundary to set.
But the hours and minutes are already long,
so longer still with days between replies.
Is writing here right?
I desperately want to, if only to hear
connection’s whisper
when I can’t feel its breath.
No. It hurts; feels wrong; unfair:
to hand so much pain to someone
who has known it themselves, and
who, because of this, is perhaps
one of the only ones who
can hold the type of hand—
mine—
that can only, defeatedly,
hand-off.
I wish we could sit together,
even in silence. What is it like for this
to feel okay? To ask for a hug?
To be held as tears cascade?
No. It feels wrong to think this,
to write this,
to beg for this.
Full stop.
You seem Earth while I’m Neptune,
sharing deep blues—
all of mine cold or frozen but
only some of yours so,
swirled with enough life—
to also birth browns and greens.
I don’t see how to defrost myself
to that messy, mixed place
mocking the metered movement of
my mind’s solar neighbourhood.
How do I skip rope across the rings of Uranus and Saturn,
swim the storms of Jupiter and sprint the red sands of Mars
without going too far—
baking into the rock of Venus and Mercury?
But the grass can’t be greener
if I’ve never even known grass or green.
It’s in your holding of my hand without
absorbing what it holds.
In loving the hand itself.
Because all hands
are a nebula moulding
galactic weather patterns.
“Write here, anytime” is you saying:
here is my open hand
and though it will never be yours to use
you can hold it with one hand
while the other keeps writing.
Keeps fighting.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
