Flare

After a ship survives a serious storm, the crew doesn't forget.

They notice weather differently.

A shift in wind means something.

Dark clouds command attention.

A sound from the hull that once seemed insignificant suddenly matters. 

Past wounds create flares.

A disagreement.

A change in tone.

A misunderstanding.

A bedroom suddenly empty.

Something resembles the beginning of an old pattern and—

Flare.

A flare is not a shipwreck.  It is a signal.

The body remembers before the mind has finished gathering evidence.

Something has happened. Something needs attention. Look here.

A dark cloud no longer looks like just a cloud.  A sudden shift in wind carries memory. The first hard wave against the hull can awaken every wave that came before it.

There is wisdom in remembering storms.

There is also danger in believing every change in weather means the storm has returned.

I've been thinking lately about what happens after we hurt someone we love.

Accountability asks us to remember. To repair what we damaged. To change the behaviors that caused harm. To understand that trust cannot be demanded simply because we are tired of earning it.

But eventually another question appears.

How long should the past be allowed to interpret the present?

A mistake can resemble an old pattern without being its return.

A disagreement can feel familiar without having the same ending.

And sometimes a flare means only this:

Something frightened me.

Not:

Abandon ship.

I know something about false alarms.

My own wolves have spent months mistaking uncertainty for catastrophe.  A delayed text becomes rejection. Distance becomes abandonment.  An unanswered question becomes an answer I never actually received.

Fear is an extraordinarily convincing navigator.

Sometimes I wonder whether the people we've hurt would be happier with someone who carries none of the history.

Someone without the scars.

Someone whose mistakes don't resemble old storms because there were no old storms between them.

Perhaps.

But there are no empty ships.

Every person arrives carrying weather of their own.

Maybe love isn't finding someone with whom no storm has ever happened.

Maybe it's discovering whether two people can eventually stop sailing by the weather report from a storm that has already passed.

A flare asks us to look.

Not to panic.

Not to pretend nothing happened.

Not to abandon the vessel before we've checked the hull.

Just to look.

At the weather.

At the damage.

At the person standing beside us.

And perhaps more importantly, at whether the storm we're responding to is the one happening now—

or the one we still remember.