When the Dust Settles

There is something that people don’t talk about.

Perhaps it’s not universal, and that’s why.

Perhaps it’s scary, and that’s why.

Perhaps it’s uncomfortable, and that’s why.

I call it when the dust settles.

When something pulls your life off track, something like an accident or an illness or a mistake, it confuses things. We’ll call that the explosion for the sake of this illustration.

My explosion was delivered by nervous lips in what should have been a safe place.

“He’s fine. He just needs a few stitches.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. It’s okay. I understand.”

Enter our next characters.

“What happened?”

“It’s my dad. He’s on his way to the hospital.”

I knew he needed more than a few stitches. I felt it.

Cry. Run. Hide. Hug. Speak. Cry. Hold. Speak. Leave.

In short, I rushed to the hospital and watched everything fall apart. I watched moments tear at the seams. I watched everyone, everyone, everyone crumble. I watched people tape themselves up to help the more damaged. I watched a red river rinse away my expectations. I cried then too.

We adjusted too fast. There was no time for pause. I had to go to college, he had to stay alive. It was complicated and fast and we split the time between feverishly sprinting and letting people drag us, but we made it. He made it.

He made it.

So I went to school. Still running fast and pretending I wasn’t bruised from head to toe from the tripping and dragging. Yes, he’s okay. Yes, we are okay. Yes, I am enjoying my classes, thank you for asking. And I swear I wasn’t aware if they were lies back then.

But looking back, I don’t know.

We were going so fast, I don’t know what happened. I had to keep up. That’s a phrase that I heard in my mind a lot. I felt like everyone was moving fast and I was scraping behind them, wheezing, barely catching up.

But things are okay now. At the very least, they settled. That’s where I discovered the name for that place. That time. After the explosion, but before the recovery.

When the Dust Settles

It’s when everything from that tornado that tore apart your plans comes falling back to the ground. You realize you have survived. Maybe others did, maybe they didn’t, but you did. The dust has settled. You begin to take inventory of what else made it through. And a lot of things hit you that you didn’t know were waiting.

You feel afraid.

You feel guilty.

You feel confused.

You feel overwhelmed.

That one is funny, isn’t it? It seems so impossible. After what you have just been through, how could the calm feel overwhelming? Nothing is happening here.

But when you have been moving so fast for so long, to slow down feels like the impossible thing. It feels like the wrong move.

It feels like the scariest thing you could do.

But it’s so necessary.

And I did it. I hated every second of it, but I came to this skidding halt. I could see things in focus, not as they flew past me, and it was harder. It is harder. I had this drive when things were a wreck. Things happened too fast to feel and that was okay. I was surviving. It made living in this world where I’m not running and no one is going to die if little things go wrong feel like something foreign.

Things are okay, and that’s the strangest thing about the dust. Maybe life looks completely different. Maybe you look completely different. Maybe you lost people and things and dreams along the way. But you are here. I am here.

That is good enough for a while.

And at least we are talking about it.