Good

Upon learning the news that you’re quitting, she says it’s a shame. “There are only a few good ones,” she says. Implication: you’re one of them. “They’re all good ones,” you say, but she shakes her head. “I have different eyes than you. I’m older.”

And you wonder, you wonder whether there is anything you could say that would make her pause to think, anything you could do that would let her see your eyes as anything other than clouded by youth and naiveté, make her wonder if maybe, just maybe, the reason you’re one of the good ones is the fact that you believe they all are.

They all are.

You want to explain to her that it’s not that you don’t see what she sees. On your fifteen-minute breaks you sit alone and grieve in silence for the ignorance, the gossip, the all-too-human failure to see outside one’s own sphere, to remember the fragility of the worlds of others and how it matches one’s own. Laziness, back-stabbing, off-color jokes—It’s not that you don’t see. It’s not that you don’t know. But you think maybe she doesn’t see what you see—the young mother raising her daughter alone and never complaining, never—with word or silence—letting anyone know if it’s hard. If it hurts. Does she see the couple who lost their son treat every “bad one” as their own? Does she see the old soldiers and the young drop-outs who hide their scars in equal measure and continue because they believe with everything they can bear to have that there is a way for all this to be better? They all do what they can with what they have.

The old man with the broken arm says it’s taken him a lifetime to learn the things you know, but you know where he’s come from and it’s not about you or about him. He did what he could with what he had. Now he reads the people coming through the door and knows the words to say to make them smile; he reads in the breakroom and comes back to tell you about what he hopes will happen when he dies. He tells you to keep a smile on your heart, not your face, because it doesn’t do much good if you can’t feel it.

They’re all good ones.

I wonder if she knows about the good ones. I wonder if she knows that, for so many of us, every word and gesture, every smile is consciously selected from our extensive armories, where we’ve kept it and honed it and polished it, practiced with it over and over again to protect ourselves please god let me make them happy don’t let me fail don’t let me fall please I don’t want to hurt anyone I just want it to be okay for me to be here. I wonder whether she knows. We have to be good because anything less than that and we are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We do what we can with what we have and it is not enough, not enough, never enough and we wonder what it’s like to answer the phone without having to keep our voices from shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails without my hands shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails at all, to not smile at the first sign of fear or pain or confusion so that no one will know it hurts, no one believes it hurts, I wonder what it’s like to know how to say that it hurts and I am drowning. I wonder whether she knows how many of us look ahead when we’re told we have a bright future and see nothing, nothing. “With your positive attitude, I know you’ll go far,” he says, and I am a walking suit of armor with nothing inside, so I smile and say thank you.

I am one of the good ones. She doesn’t know what that means. I am one of the good ones and I have broken my own heart and blinded my own eyes to the things I don’t want to see. I am one of the good ones; I am opening my veins to water the earth in hopes that something better than me will grow—

all this good, and none of it will ever be enough.