What Keeps You Off the Floor

The world breaks people. Not metaphorically—it just does it, routinely, as a matter of course, and no amount of fresh optimism insulates you from the mechanism. You get up convinced you’ve figured something out, and then something happens to show you exactly how little your convictions matter to the machinery. You end up on the floor again. The floor is usually dirty.

What gets me up isn’t willpower. It’s people. A specific, small number of them who’ve been around long enough to know when I need feeding, when I need to be told directly that I’m being an idiot, and when I just need someone to sit in the same room without asking anything of me.

We fight. We’ve always fought—over real things, stupid things, and things where the line between them blurred until it disappeared. We’ve said the hard versions of true things at the worst possible moments. We’ve celebrated badly and grieved badly and sometimes done both at once. The faces aren’t always the same faces they used to be—some people I was certain about turned out to be temporary, and some who are still here I would have bet against at the time. But the transaction stays the same: they show up. I show up. That covers most of it.

I know what the version of me without them looks like. I’ve caught glimpses. He’s not managing well.