Mackenzie K. Writes

I used to think change happened slowly. Step-by-step. One foot in front of the other. Each moment guiding us towards something new in the kind, gentle way in which you wade out into the surf. Floating, floating, floating, and then you look back and realize you’re further than you ever thought possible. But sometimes change is sudden.

Sometimes change comes on a Thursday afternoon and hits you in the gut. Sometimes it rips you open and carves you clean like a pumpkin, skinning you alive until there’s no pain, there’s no tears. There’s just that empty numbness that whispers “I used to have something inside of me, but it’s gone now. There used to be muscles and veins and blood and guts but I am nothing more than a shell. Please help me. Please know this smile isn’t real. Please give me back my strings.”

(“aww, look at the Jack-O-Lantern; she’s grinning!”)

Sometimes change takes you to a coffee shop where you try not to look like you’re breaking. Sometimes it hits you in the eyelids and suddenly you’re crying and you didn’t know you had any tears left in your face, but there they are, and they’re spilling out and everyone can see them and everyone is judging and your hot chocolate tastes like disappointment and rust.

Sometimes change isn’t the one who hurt you, but you need someone or something to blame, and he seems like the easiest choice.

“I don’t like change! I want everything to stay the same! Make it go away. Make it go back to the way it was before!”

But the way it was before is sand, and the house you built was always meant to be washed away with the tide. You put your prettiest shells in the windows and made flags with seagull feathers and told yourself it was real–it was all real. And onlookers smile and say to themselves “how sweet is that little girl playing make-believe. She looks so content in her house of dirt.”

But then comes the change and then comes the tide and it’s all washed away and swept clean. And the windows are seashells and the future’s wet feathers and your dreams are clumps of sand between your fingers and toes. And you wonder if you’d just held on tighter if maybe it wouldn’t have all slipped away.

But now it’s too late because it’s gone.

Sometimes change is a friend. He sees you crying over crushed seashells and make-believe dreams and offers his hand to you. Pulls you to standing. Gives you a hug.

(it’s okay, you know. it was always meant to be this way. you don’t have to fear the unknown.)

Sometimes change is exactly what you needed at exactly the right moment–you just didn’t realize it yet. And the beach is swept clean and your tears are quickly drying and there’s a sunset on the horizon, all yellows and purples and oranges and pinks.

And for the first time, you feel like maybe that pumpkin hollow in your chest is the feeling of being set free.