I Told Him

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry Fifty-Two

I have a confession.

Not the one I told him.

The one I have been holding since.

For days I have sat with the aftermath, trying to understand what changed.

I told him.

After months of carrying it quietly, after conversations with myself, prayers, poems, questions, and wonderings, I finally told him.

Not elegantly.

Not soberly.

Not in the carefully curated way I would have chosen had I scripted the moment.

Life rarely asks permission before becoming real.

And yet, when it was over, I did not feel regret.

I felt release.

That surprised me.

Because I thought the ache would come from what I had said.

Instead, the ache came from realizing how much love I had been carrying.

Not longing.

Not possession.

Not expectation.

Love.

The kind that arrives and asks for nothing.

The kind that changes you simply by existing.

The kind that cannot always be built into a future but remains true nonetheless.

I kept waiting for the feeling to become something else.

Regret.

Embarrassment.

Grief.

Some lesser thing I could more easily explain.

Instead, it remained what it had always been.

Love.

Not growing.
Not diminishing.

Simply resting where it was.

And that was perhaps the strangest part of all.

Nothing had been resolved.

Nothing had been claimed.

Nothing had been lost.

Yet something inside me had become lighter.

For days I struggled to explain the feeling.

Then I looked up and saw a sunset burning through the trees.

I almost photographed the sunset.

Instead, I photographed everything standing in front of it.

The trees.

The silhouettes.

The darkened branches stretching toward the light.

And suddenly I understood.

It was never the sunset alone that was beautiful.

It was what the light illuminated.

The ache was never about losing something.

The ache was never about wanting more.

The ache was the realization that some things are so beautiful they exceed our ability to contain them in a single moment.

Some loves.

Some sunsets.

Some truths.

They arrive larger than the heart has room for.

And so the heart stretches.

And stretching feels remarkably like ache.

I think we are taught to associate ache with absence.

But there is another kind.

The ache of beauty.

The ache of gratitude.

The ache that arrives when a moment, a truth, or a love becomes larger than language.

Perhaps awe and ache are not distant cousins at all.

Perhaps they are the same feeling viewed from different directions.

With Grace & Ink,

–Mai