I am me
I AM ME
IVY
A WHILE LATER
I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself who I am. Trying to figure out if it was everything I liked as a kid, before I had to make my own doctor appointments or knew how to fill in a tax return.
Maybe it was who I became in college, when I started to finally feel like an adult, making grown-up choices about my future and discovering how big and broken the world really was.
Back then, leaving my childhood behind meant walking away from whimsy and daydreams and accepting that with responsibility came endless meetings and emails and saving to go to the dentist.
Are we who we wish we were? Who we could have been, if only we’d made different choices?
Which version do we count as the real us?
Or are we the sum of them all?
If we are all persistently shifting and changing and becoming new again, will we ever really have one true version of ourselves?
I know better now.
.
I am the choices I make and the causes I fight for and the way I treat the people I care about.
Lincoln says I’m too young to be getting existential. He eyes the nonfiction books that have begun congregating on my side table with a fond sort of amusement.
Yet he’ll still lie beside me at night, curled around me like a parenthesis, and let me read to him.
Lincoln must be a mind reader.
He always knows when I need to be steadied, how to make me speechless when I’m talking too much or how to fill in the silence with what I can’t say. Since the day I came down to the bar and found him there, he’s made sure I know how he feels, poured it into every look, every touch, every word. Finds out what I want and then gives it, over and over and over.
He still makes me nervous in all the best ways, butterflies dancing around my heart like being hit with a fairy-tale wish.
My showers are concerts now, with candles flickering against the tiles while I serenade the room.
He’s a soft bed at night, a shot of Jaeger on opening night, my favorite song on repeat.
It’s too much. It’s not enough. It’s every fantasy brought to life.