The Kind of Joy We Don’t Forget

There’s a kind of joy I don’t think we ever fully forget.

It doesn’t leave. It just gets buried under noise. Under responsibility. Under the versions of

ourselves that learned to stay guarded where we once stayed open.

For me, it still feels like Christmas Eve.

I used to wake in the dark before morning had decided what it was. The house was still, but not empty. Something in it felt held—like even silence was waiting.

I could never tell where sleep ended and excitement began.

And then morning would arrive too early, and exactly on time.

My brother and I would step into the living room without waking anyone. We didn’t rush. We’d go straight to the floor, lying under the Christmas tree, wrapped in blankets that never quite fit how awake we felt.

From there, everything looked larger than it should have.

Branches overhead like a second ceiling. Lights softened into something underwater. The room didn’t feel decorated. It felt changed.

We didn’t talk much.

There was nothing to get to yet.

Just that suspended feeling of almost.

Not wanting anything to move, and knowing it already was.

The first time I felt something like it again, I didn’t name it.

Time just stopped insisting on itself.

Ordinary things lost their edges.

Silence didn’t feel empty. It filled the room differently.

I didn’t try to hold onto it.

I stayed where it was.

Later, I called it love.

Not because it clarified anything—but because I needed a word large enough not to collapse under it.

It made things closer. Not louder.

A room could hold more air. A pause could stretch without breaking. Even walking beside someone felt slightly out of step with ordinary time.

I didn’t know then how quickly that kind of feeling rearranges itself.

Some people don’t stay.

They arrive like a mirror left on a wall you forgot you were still passing every day.

You see things you didn’t know were still moving in you.

Things you thought had already passed.

You don’t notice the change while it’s happening.

Only later, when the room feels different and you can’t point to why.

It’s easy to call that loss.

But it doesn’t leave cleanly enough for that.

It lingers in how you enter rooms afterward.

In what you reach for without thinking.

In what you stop offering before anyone asks.

There are ways people teach you how to love that have nothing to do with staying.

How quickly you pull yourself back.

What you hide when you want to be chosen.

What you become when you’re not sure you will be.

None of us arrive whole.

We arrive adjusting.

Still trying to become someone who can be kept.

And still, something keeps reaching.

That reaching comes before everything else.

I used to think the point was finding the right person.

Now it feels closer to noticing what disappears from you when you’re trying to be loved.

And what returns when you stop.

Some connections don’t remain in form, but they don’t leave in shape either.

They scatter into the way you pause before speaking.

Into the way you recognize yourself mid-sentence.

Not because they broke anything smaller.

But because they showed you what you were willing to set aside without noticing.

Forgiveness isn’t an event.

It’s what happens when you stop asking the past to rewrite itself.

When memory stops feeling like something you have to argue with.

When it becomes just what happened, without needing to be rearranged.

And then, slowly, something else becomes possible.

Not performing.

Not preparing.

Not proving.

Just being seen without adjusting.

And not leaving.

That kind of presence doesn’t announce itself.

It shows up in ordinary light.

A room in the morning. Floor space. Quiet that doesn’t ask to be filled.

No direction. No version of yourself waiting to be stepped into next.

Just the fact of being here.

Unassigned.

Unedited.

It feels familiar in a way that doesn’t belong to any one moment.

Not childhood.

Not love.

Something underneath both of them.

Like a place you recognize without remembering arriving.

I used to think those moments were rare.

Now I think I was just moving too quickly to notice when they appeared.

This morning, I stood still long enough for one to meet me where I already was.

Light on the floor. Quiet I didn’t interrupt. Nothing asking to continue.

For a few seconds, nothing required anything back.

And it didn’t feel new.

Only remembered.