Believing in someone:
Enjoying them. Liking their ways. Relishing the reliable and savouring surprise, when it comes. Feeling spongey and soft about the things they do for you. Feeling just as sentimental for acts that are of personal impertinence.
Blooming a wispy shade of annoyance at their small protuberances of habit, those that impinge on your own twitches, and carrying on without issue, still. Choosing to abstain from quarrel when their movements are not just as yours might be. Recognizing opportunity for self-reflection in the placid waters of their character. Coming around to the idiosyncratic; appropriating it, furtively, for your own flip book memory.
Sharing the fractal aftershocks of whatever pain rattles deep to their faults, clinking and calling out in tinny echoes on the way down. Knowing you can’t heal much but not letting that scare you; displacing the fantasy of panaceal ability to allow for empathy. Providing in proprietary fashion, be it with comfort or patience or distance. Reserving predictive judgement when their senses fail them, again. More than anything, maintaining certainty that the winds will shift, that their lightness isn’t lost to shifting tides, not for good. And when wheat-coloured sentiments sweep back over aged plains: doing your part for the earth, which waits to be tilled by tenderness.
But also. Showing no signs of fear when wracked with it, for them, for their purpose and contentment and worth and struggles. Sometimes plunging your heart to anchor a ship whose pitching is churning up acid. Standing ground when the panic blisters the barricades you built out yourself. Treading the blanched sidewalk between the lawn of bitten weeds and beetle shells and then the somber asphalt highway, hot with friction and exhaust. Creating from air, as trees, the sustenance to go on without love lost or faith forgone even when every root of your own is bone-dry. Seeing sanity as something that must be passed up and back and forth always, shared continually. Knowing when to wait your turn.
Then seeing afresh the face that implored and has waited and now offers in kind. It’s funny how belief takes its time to uncrush you. Wiring up the emotional billboard to the city supply and displaying what you feel. Morse-coding in tea lights scattered around the house that you will not stop loving, please let’s not add that doubt to the receipts. Relying. Trusting. Thanking. Going on. The accordion of it breathes and there’s air at the blood cells, there’s goodness restored, there’s hope again renewed.