The Hardest Thing To Accept Is Being Understood

The jars were meant to confuse even me — labels scrawled backward, dates falsified, contents misnamed to keep them harmless. I stacked them like decoys — rows of false feelings, the real ones buried deeper, sealed in wax no hand could open. Years I have walked these shelves blind, touching glass like a stranger in my own skin; aware of the weight, but never sure what it held. Then you came — not breaking, not judging — turning the right ones over in silence, as if you always knew where I’d hidden the truest rot. I want to shout liar, fraud, to call your kindness a trick — because what sense can there be in understanding what is senseless? But you lift a jar I thought unopenable, hold it to the light; and even I can see through it. A clarity I never asked for, yet cannot deny — painful, precise, like waking from sleep in a burning room. I built these shelves crooked on purpose, so even I would lose my way, so even I could not find the one jar with my true name scrawled under the lid. Years, I walked these tunnels blind — aware of the weight of glass, but never knowing its contents. I am foreign even to myself: the way I think bends like warped wood, splintering under every step. A painful clarity — like waking to sunlight on burned skin, like discovering the wound was always mine to tend. Now the jars sing at night — not mournful, but bright, a low hum rising through floorboards. The shelves tremble with it; the dust learns joy. I am afraid to join them — afraid this understanding is borrowed, that one day she will set the jars down and leave the cellar quiet again.