Some of the most powerful words one can hear are not - I Love You.
No, see love is a fickle - but beautiful - thing.
Love is a choice - you can love those that cheat you; break you; take you for granted - You don't have to like those you love - for love is a choice.
It is a choice to love your children, family, spouse on the days they make the world around you miserable. No, I Love You, isn't always all that powerful.
But there are words that breathe life into souls - words that heal better than any surgeon's sutures could.
Those words are different to each of us - the pains we carry are our own, each with their own words that will mend the wound left gaping. Wounds that we may never know existed until they are healed.
But enter in a life kept busy - one foot after the other - never stopping for rest.
For to stop means to breathe - and to breathe to pause - and when the mind is given a moment to itself may not always yield positivity.
God forbid that moment comes in front of a mirror. A pause turns into a glance; and that glance can become a staring evaluation. And the questions can start to swirl.
For me, some of those questions were - Am I my mother? What parts are my father? Is any of what I see purely me?
Will I be beautiful when I'm old? And sometimes, when the light is right, I saw a strong, confident, beautiful woman staring back at me and I wondered - will anyone else ever see what was staring back at me from the mirror?
Time and time again the reflection mocks me. The voices of my own soul's frustrations of being told I'm not enough - the worlds from those around me enter that echo chamber of a paused mind.
They drown out the whispers of hope and any self-confidence; the beatings of hate and insult leave their fiery brand on what I see staring back at me.
As quickly as that moment begins it ends - shaken off by the call of the next assignment to complete - one foot in front of the other - from morning until night, never stopping, never giving a chance for those pauses.
Years add up, a silenced mind never letting the hope and brilliance of the heart be free. A locked door with a buried skeleton key keeping the limbo between self-apathy and true enjoyment intact. Like a 2-year-old playing hide and seek - if I don't see you, I don't have to be addressed or discovered.
Eventually the pauses build up, stacked higher and higher, until something in life forces them to be taken at the same time. What should be a moment - a blink - becomes a sudden traffic jam. No where to go, no foot in front of the other. Full Stop.
However this time - one of a few times in my life these full stops have happened - someone found the skeleton key. Three tiny words in that full stop that forever changed the navigational settings.
For me those words were - I like YOU. I LIKE you. The same three words, each inflection conveying a new strength and turn of the key in the old, rusted, padlock.
And with those words the echo chamber filled with the voices of those from my earliest days is shattered.
That pause before a mirror became a moment where the soft light and warmth of a gentle sun illuminated the best features of my heart - of the way that life had built me up in greatness - and for the first time - all the cuts and lashes of those who were supposed to protect me but didn't were wiped clean.
Because in that moment one who saw me in darkness realized my fire and made me see it, too - letting my soul be free in all it's glory.
Love very well may have been the root of that vision - but it was paired with more.
To like someone. To enjoy who they are and have become - and to give them that reciporcative vision of that - in that there is power.
Power to silence past hate; to silence the self-doubt; to silence the sound of a heart shattering because it is never enough as it is.
Love - that fickle thing - that powerful choice we make is good - but to combine that choice with the beauty of letting another know they are enjoyed, that it is more than a resolved mental decision on how you feel about who they are-
Those can be the most powerful words, the freeing words that empower a spirit to be free to carry on as they were - because at that moment they truly were enough as they were.
©Kristen Garcia 04-2017
