God, You know.
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Sensitivity, responsiveness, presence, communication, grace, and patience to start.
Trust, faith, education, tenderness, and love with time and caring cultivation.
An eventual teammate, collaborator, and best friend.
That is what I’m looking for. Someone whose feedback I sought said it was a long list to live up to. That it would make people feel overwhelmed.
Hinge’s AI feedback said, ‘Consider sharing what makes these qualities important to you. What are your favorite ways to show or receive these traits in a relationship?’
I had chosen the full list over elaboration. Each word felt too important to cut. Maybe just tenderness is enough for others to contemplate. It didn’t feel like enough though, until I’d named my needs comprehensively.
And if I think a need important, why not make it known? Shouldn’t my profile thoroughly represent me?
And so I continue the trial of discernment. My transparency functions like a trust fall, but no one has caught me yet. The seeming assignment is to reconfigure myself and my results by extension.
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In my inquiry about a room advertised on Craigslist I disclosed my long showers and desire to host, along with biographical details. The listing did ask about what was going on in my world.
I didn’t get a response.
I followed up. In the moment it felt appropriate to do so. Surely they weren’t ignoring me right? What if my email was buried or accidentally overlooked?
I have a powerful imagination.
With it I like to just make out signs of interest in my favor. The signs exist in ephemeral traces, like the colors you think you see in the darkness behind your lids. I cling to possibilities. Scenarios unfold in escalating patterns. According to one, these patterns are myths sold to me as desires. According to another, these patterns are real experiences elsewhere, if not in my life.
Maybe straining my perception doesn’t have to be maladaptive. If I shift from straining to see the existence of a certain kind of human love or acceptance, unconfirmed or yet to be determined with the person in question, and instead enlist my longing in witnessing Divinity, a search destination ultimately more reliable and true, I can accustom myself to observation over delusion.
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Hind from Gaza writes asking for support in reuniting with her children. She asks for forgiveness if she bothered me, and apologizes for writing me in the first place.
Qosai asks for my donation, hoping that I don’t find him annoying.
Rahoofa admits shame.
Imagine, accounting for and internalizing the sensibilities of those in safety while terrorized and destitute. Imagine requesting forgiveness from someone who owes you an apology for their disengagement.
God, You know.
You know that I intend to help and reassure these souls.
They are honest, naming the unarticulated as I have.
They are as direct as I was when I was abandoned for being too much.
They recognize a discomfort that I do not want to admit.
I feel overwhelmed. I don’t want to say no. I leave the messages as requests. For now, I say. Raghad follows up on her donation ask:
“Why aren’t you helping me?”
I have learned through obsession’s painful lessons that decency involves leaving people alone when they don’t respond. I find myself in the position of those whose silence I once could not accept.
I can attest to the personal intensity that emerges from living in chaos.
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I have linked the donation campaigns of Hind, Qosai, Rahoofa, and Raghad above, where I first mention each of their names. Please consider extending them a donation.