The Quiet You Are Allowed To Want

Somewhere across the long stretch of years, you may have begun to quietly accept that peace was for other people. That calm was something the lucky ones had inherited and you had not. That stability was a kind of climate that simply did not visit the rooms you found yourself standing in.

You are allowed to want it back.

The peace you are longing for is not extravagant. It is the morning that opens without dread. It is the small turn of the key in the lock at the end of a working day, into a home that does not have weather inside it. It is the phone that can sit on the counter without your stomach learning to read it. It is the afternoon that gets to be just an afternoon, instead of an unfolding negotiation with someone else's mood.

This is the peace your body has been quietly asking for, sometimes for years. The asking has not been loud. It has been the steady underground hum of a person who has known, all along, what she was missing. The asking was not unreasonable. The conditions that made the asking unanswerable were the unreasonable part.

You are allowed to want the quiet. You are allowed to want it now, not later, not after you have earned it through more suffering, not after you have proven yourself sufficiently improved to deserve it. The wanting itself is honest. The wanting itself is the beginning of letting the quiet eventually arrive.

You do not have to argue for any of this. You only have to let yourself, in the small private inside-the-body register, name the longing. The naming is the first soft step. The longer slow work of building the quiet, day by day, comes later. For today, simply let yourself want it.