There are still rooms where I become polite before I become honest

Dear Delyara, It’s not that politeness is bad. It’s that in some spaces I can feel it arrive as protection rather than character. Extra careful wording. Smaller feeling. Safer sentences. Less direct need. The whole performance of being easy to hold. It happens so quickly that I sometimes don’t notice until later, when I’m alone and feeling the dull ache of having once again given somebody the manageable version of me. Those rooms are not always obviously dangerous. That’s what makes it harder. Sometimes they are simply familiar in a way my body does not trust. Old wounds don’t only live in pain. They live in choreography.