Safe is a Place Within

It’s raining outside. It’s cool, but not cold. Everyone around me is asleep. Aside the odd passing car, the neighbourhood seems shut in for the night.

But not me.

I listen to the pattering of the rain. It is soothing and alluring. It is a sound I never get tired of hearing. Some think of it as clearing and cleansing. For me, it is calming and oddly, safe.

Safe is not something I commonly feel.

Safe is not a circumstance or set of walls that surround me. It is a place within myself that escapes me, mostly.

To the outside world, this concern or occasional lack in safety would not be believed let alone understood. How could anyone understand? There is only one pair of shoes for me and my world, and they are on my feet.

Feeling safe for me is not about keeping people out or in. It is not about getting from A to B. It is so much deeper than that. It encompasses so many more layers than that.

For me, it is about a place of trust within the intimacy of who I am that is very rarely given or even provided access to. However when it is, it is with open, cautious arms waiting to close, unfortunately predictably.

There is no joy in being right all the time. There is no victory in knowing how something will turn out. While rarely it does not, a miraculous surprise that is fleeting. I know that when that trust is holding back, hidden behind the walls of compartmentalising and smiles that are completely unrelated, it will soon be broken.

Perhaps to the believed importance of another. Perhaps because too much time was spent on me, away from what I give, and not what is given. Perhaps this is how it will always be, as it always has. Perhaps because it is expected.

When it does, it leaves this laceration that deepens with frequency. The first or so is brushed off. Coincidence. A bad day. Stress. But then it happens again and again. Time lapses without a pattern.

Why is this always the way? Why am I made to feel bad, punished almost, for the self liberty and truth, when others cannot.

The pain lingers. It echoes in my mind through my veins into the pit of my stomach. The safety of me is threatened and that openness must be questioned, it must decrease. This dance of give and take, hope and disappointment.

Tears sit in my eyes. My throat closed in awaiting sobs. “Walk it off” I think to myself. “Walk it off”. After several deep breathes, an expression where pain no longer hides in the dead of night, where there is only me, my silence and the echoes I know all too well.

The safety is never about me. When it is not, the door is closed.