Bright

Your genius is airborne.

Totes Meer (1941) by Paul Nash

You want to know what it does for me, how it feels to care too much, how it feels to absorb every photon of light, to soak in every moment, to know your cells are perfect, empty spheres, thirsty for divinity.

It feels like that afternoon on a sparkling hot roof in New Orleans, watching strangers in the backyard, boiling liquid sun on their backs, helicopters circling overhead, gold and purple beads draped over unwashed bodies. We kissed in the sunlight, we kissed on the rooftop, you felt it, we felt it, we kissed in the hallway, we had sex in the bathroom, you crawled out the window.

I walked back down the hallway, through a sea of stranger’s eyes. The start of a dark decade, the first of many dark hallways, a decade of dead seas packed with broken strangers.

I followed you back to the sunshine. I followed you but you were different, you had better things to do, you had better people to talk to, you had better places to be. The sun sank behind the rooftop, you didn’t stay still, you were surrounded, there were other girls, you were blind to me. You were shaking off your shadow, shaking off your past needs, all needs had evaporated.

Normal life is like that: Coming down. Following, wondering, dying to ask, feeling like a criminal for wanting more, a badly drawn caricature of a woman in need, twisted wreckage, a woman in a mask, a thief, a cook, his wife, her lover. Watching yourself change shape as necessary. Watching yourself dissipate, over and over, like toxic droplets to be avoided. They don’t know if you’re airborne or not and the truth is, they don’t really care. They don’t love you like I love you.

Normal life is like that: Knowing they don’t really care. Knowing their minds are already crawling out the window. Knowing that hungry eyes on a rooftop are the same as indifferent eyes in the dark hallway. The world is constructed from your shame and theirs, droplets of shame filled with airborne morning stars, weapons looking for connection. That’s normal: You are pestilence itself, you are a plague, you are a curse. That’s normal life: Stop following me. Stop floating everywhere. Leave me alone.

Emancipate yourself. No one else can save you. This pestilence is particle-waves. You are the brightest star in the universe.

Weightless expansion. Ego has nothing to do with it. You assume it’s a sin of the ego because you’re squinting through clouds of shame, forming words you heard once from the mouths of other shame-clouded, shame-dispensing egomaniacs.

Once you start expanding, it feels like walking ten miles down an empty road, knowing that your clear mind is a blank slate for the gods to doodle on while mulling the fate of the world, knowing that your open heart is a room for the most graceful souls that ever lived to mingle in, gesturing questions to each other about what comes next. The loveliest new souls are like small children, awakened to a brilliant world, the regrets and fears of the old world sliding off their skin and slipping away.

You want to know what it means to be shameless. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe all you want to know is how much I care, what I think of you, what I see in you, what I love about you, what I admire in you, what I emulate, what I snicker at, what I dislike, what I think is beneath me to even consider. All I know is this: Your eavesdropping ego is holding you back.

Your eavesdropping ego dampens your curiosity about other people, installs wire taps that only pick up the sound of your own name, measures your value repeatedly. Your eavesdropping ego wants a magic mirror: Who’s the fairest of them all?

Look at the mirror of the night sky instead. Being shameless means being humbled means becoming invincible. Being shameless means feeling the cells in your body rejoice at the start of a new day. We can do anything. Being shameless means believing that the most lovable, admirable, despicable, laughable demigods are rooting for you.

Your ego is the smallest, emptiest, most flaccid piece of you. I’m sorry but it’s true. You are in a dark hallway. It’s time to try harder. It’s time to reimagine yourself as bigger and more brilliant. It’s time to start expanding in every direction. Stop stating what you can and can’t do. Stop drawing boundaries to make yourself safer. Ask yourself if you can do more. Ask yourself if you’re more brilliant than you ever imagined.

I don’t need expansion from you. You need it. I’ll love you either way. The arrogant man in the clown car: I loved you from the second I met you. I was an arrogant man in a clown car, too.

But I got out of my car.

Now I’m walking. Just a man walking down the road. Just a man who knows that emptiness is fullness. Just a man who eats the night sky and follows no one. Just a man who will love you, no matter what.

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Heather Havrilesky is the author of What If This Were Enough? and she likes this song. The new Ask Polly newsletter is here. Ask Polly still appears on New York Magazine’s The Cut every other Wednesday; this week’s is about love in the time of covid. Write to Molly (askmolly@protonmail.com) or Polly (askpolly@protonmail.com). Polly cares more.