She looks out from her porch across the quiet water and lifts her face to the wind and silence of the world she’s creating for herself. She’s afraid, who wouldn’t be? She is, at the same time, filled with an uncontainable joy, and why should she try to contain it?

Like most things in life, there is a balance that must be maintained for things to grow ever forward; to deter the stagnation of the soul that comes with too much. Too much sameness, too much resentment, too much blame. The blame is the most damaging as it can be directed inward to the self or outward to another, both being a total waste of life and time.

She smiles for a moment at her joy, and then her eyes fill with tears as she begins her confession. It’s a hard, but necessary thing she’s doing. If she holds onto her pride, and confesses nothing, then everything she’s doing is pointless. She has to say her part in it all, claim her mistakes and wrong-thinking. There are penalties for the mistakes she has made, and she has paid for most of them already by living with them every day.

Now it’s time to confess and forgive and move on. 

It starts as a whisper, as she names the dreams she put on the shoulders of another that were hers alone to pursue. Her voice trembles just a little as she speaks every wish she had for them that seems to now be nothing but a silly fairytale remembered from bedtime stories. Her heart quivers and cracks as she admits freely that what she asked of him was beyond his capability to give. Beyond even his desire to give.

They are both the result of hearts unevenly yoked, each causing the other to falter.

He is a realist, and she is a seeker. He believes in what is right now, and she believes in what could be. He’s right. So is She. She confesses that she did not have the power to blend those into a thriving life, and knows he has no desire to blend at all. She wants love. He wants respect.

Neither of them got what they wanted.

That is her greatest confession; her greatest sorrow. They matched themselves together, and both of them starved to death from the inside out. He left more, did more, worked more. She turned into herself, pounding out her frustration and loss on the keyboard. What he did hurt her heart, what she did hurt his pride.

Both are apparently unforgivable offenses.

So here She stands. Confessing to the world her greatest failure. The failure to successfully love and respect the one she chose to build a life with. What his part is in this is of no concern to her now. That will be for him to see or not, to confess or not. Her confession is what matters, or she will never go any farther than where she stands right now.

Remaining the same is unacceptable to her. There are dreams to be had, a life to live.

So she stepped away from her keyboard, and into an unwritten future. She walked away from apparent safety into the uncertainty that comes from wearing courage cleverly disguised as foolishness and rash thinking.

No one understands how brave she is being in the face of fear. No one knows how her blood runs cold to consider that she may be wrong, and have nothing to offer the world. It crosses no one’s mind that she wants her legacy to be one of living without apology, loving without restraint, and laughing over mistakes that are only tools for learning. None of this clear to anyone but her, and she confesses that it scares her that she might be wrong.

But what if She’s right?