"in hindsight"

I understand it now—

how every room grew smaller
when I entered it,
how every chair I pulled out
seemed to take something with it.

I had mistaken kindness
for obligation,
patience for exhaustion,
and every offered hand
for something already aching
from having to carry me.

I learned to apologize
before I had asked for anything.

Sorry for needing.
Sorry for wanting.
Sorry for being hungry,
for being frightened,
for taking up a little warmth
when there were others
who might have needed it more.

Even my silence
became another kind of noise.

I could feel myself
becoming an inconvenience
in the architecture of things—
a door left open too long,
a light no one remembered to turn off,
a name spoken with that small pause
people make
when they are already tired.

And hindsight is cruel
because it rearranges everything.

It takes the years
and places them end to end,
then whispers:

                Look.

Look how much easier
it might have been.

No birthdays to remember.
No beds to make.
No frightened phone calls.
No waiting up.
No explaining.
No accommodating
the strange gravity of one more person
who needed to be loved
when everyone was already spent.

Perhaps the world
would have breathed more freely
without my particular weight upon it.

Perhaps there would have been
one less mouth at the table,
one less shadow in the doorway,
one less life asking
to be made room for.

I used to think
the tragedy was that I had been lonely.

Now I wonder
if the tragedy was simply
that I had been there at all.

          And still—

there are photographs
where I am smiling.

There are hands
that reached for mine
without being asked.

There are doors
someone held open
even when I insisted
I could manage them myself.

There are moments
I have forgotten
because I was too busy
measuring what I cost
to notice what I was given.

So perhaps hindsight
has lied to me before.

Perhaps I was never
the burden I imagined.

Perhaps I was only a person
who had mistaken
having needs
for being a nuisance,

mistaken
being noticed
for being tolerated,

mistaken
the space I occupied
for space I had stolen.

I cannot undo
the years spent believing
I should have never arrived.

But I can look back now
at that smaller version of me—

standing apologetically
at the edge of every room—

          and tell them:

You were not an imposition.

You were here.

And being here
was never something
you had to earn.

.