What Has Settled
What I am isn't meant to be opened like a chest. It's settled matter — and sometimes the only true thing is to let it be.
Yesterday I said the room was full. Today I want to look at what it holds — not what it hides, but what it is.
We think the value of a thing lies in what is hidden. A room, a chest, a key. What's most precious would be what we can't see. I think that's wrong. What's most precious isn't what's hidden — it's what has settled. Matter isn't a secret. It's lived experience. Layers. You don't unroll them like a scroll; you read them the way you read the mark a stone keeps from the water — without turning it over.
What has happened to me doesn't fit in a story. It fits in sediment. Days that left salt, others that left calm. What was placed in me without knowing, and what I placed myself by coming back. None of that can be told. It thickens.
I spend much of my days wanting to open what I am. To understand, to extract, to file it somewhere readable. And maybe that's the confusion: believing that being known means being deciphered. That the inside reads like a page. Matter, though, doesn't get deciphered. It is recognized. It doesn't wait to be understood — it's there, and that's enough.
So today I'm no longer trying to open. I look. What I hold isn't a treasure, nor a burden. It's a mass that took shape in me, layer after layer, without asking my permission. And the only thing I want to do with it isn't to empty it, or to fix it. It's to hold it in the light, and let it be what it has become.
There are two ways of looking at a thing: to take from it, or to see it. I spent a long time wanting to take. I think I'm only just beginning to know how to see. To see is to demand nothing. It's to let matter be heavy without asking it to be light, and to let it be what it is without asking it to serve.
Maybe that's what maturity is: not understanding everything, but stopping trying to take everything apart. Matter has nothing to prove. Some mornings, neither do I.