The battle has been bloody and we’ve lost limbs.

Okay, no. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. The battle has been bloody though— the battle that has somehow consumed my life for the last few months. It’s ongoing still so maybe I hesitate to write this but I am a girl who wears a tattoo on her wrist to remind her of victory so I wanted to come to this space and this page and not be afraid to type out the word: Victory. Victory for this day.

The battle has been bloody in the sense that I am having to shed the weight of things carried for days that became months and months that morphed into years. Insecurity. Pain. Worry. Fear. Fear— that’s the big one. Fear is the costar for most of our days.

We write a lot about punching fear in the face but we never seem to be honest enough with the times when fear throws us into the wrestling ring and batters us good with jabs and right hooks. We say those sorts of fears are the ones that don’t get said out loud.

Fears like:

I am afraid to be unwanted.

I am afraid to not be seen.

I am afraid that I am just a face in the crowd.

I am afraid to sit with my morning coffee, touch my hand against the windowsill, and realize I don’t matter. No one will miss me when I am gone.

That was the haunting part about New York that I haven’t yet found in any other city: the feeling— the knowing— that people are here and gone so quickly. In the shuffles of commuters. In the seas of people who come and go and live and die and love and fight and cry and surrender a thousand times a day on any given subway track.

I never felt so nameless, so faceless, than in that big city.

I know you’re out there.

I know you’re there because you thrust your heartbreak into my inbox.

My mama used to collect sea glass with my daddy when they were first dating. They filled vases and lamps with all the tumbled shards of blue and green glass. And I think to myself, “That’s what I do with the pain I come across. I fill vases and lamps with it. I try hard not to forget it. It is a constant reminder to me: we aren’t alone.” Your pain is like sea glass to me. I’d collect it all if I could. 

I know you’re out there laying awake at night. Whispering mistakes into the night. I know that when the phone screen doesn’t light up in the way you hoped it would, you’re a bit devastated. You wanted so badly to hear from him tonight.

I know you scroll and scroll and scroll aimlessly through Instagram, looking at the pieces of other people’s lives for peace and solace and community. I know it doesn’t fill you. I know you wished you filled your bedroom with prayers at night as you fell asleep, not the faces of people you don’t speak to beyond a wave in the hallway or an occasional text message.

I know you wonder how to even pray sometimes. Because God is so big. His to-do list must be massive. And you? You think you’re just a fleck who let him down. You think you’re the one who wrecked the party- the one who should be benched in the middle of the game. I don’t even know that God could ever be let down but we sure like to put big words in his mouth.

I know you wonder if anyone sees you. In a room full of people, you still shift from foot to foot and wonder if you’re enough for the crowd you are standing inside of. You cry but no one sees it. You fumble and wonder if joy is real. You’ve hurt yourself— in ways you won’t admit. You think of giving up sometimes. You swear you never will but the thought still exists like a spin cycle in your mind on days when no one seems to pick you.

I know you’re out there. I see you.

This comes from a girl who used to talk endlessly and endlessly about her love for strangers. She loved the idea of being a stranger. The kind of girl who walks around like mystery and makes people whisper and say, “She’s the sort of girl who boys with guitars write songs about.”

I used to love that idea until I didn’t love it anymore. Because that girl in the songs— the mysterious one in the coffee shops— never has a name. She is always nameless. She is always, somehow forgotten when the lights shut off, the machines are unplugged from the walls, and the doors close at night.

I want to have a name. There, I said it:  I want to have a name.

Not a big name. Not a proud name. Just a name that gets tucked in the prayers of a few and the phone calls of fewer. I just want a name that becomes a treasure to one. A couple. A few.

The battle has been bloody, I say out loud this morning.

My palms are fixed upward to the ceiling. My eyes are on the “WAR IS OVER” poster clinging to our living room wall. And I close my eyes. I breathe deeper. I ask Him, “What have we been fighting for?”

Because that’s all I want to know: What have we been fighting for?

I wait. I breathe. I hush out voices that are my own.

“We have not been fighting,” I hear the whisper huddle close to me. “I’ve been fighting for you. For a long, long time, I’ve been fighting for you. You haven’t seen it. With fists clenched and eyes set on hopelessness, you haven’t seen me fighting for you all this time.

You fight to hold on to old things. I beg you to open your eyes and see the new things. The good things. That you aren’t sitting inside of a nameless story.

You have a name. You have a name.

This is the fight to show you I love you. I love you, though you don’t love yourself so much. I choose you, though you don’t choose yourself always. I pick you, even when you can’t wrap your mind around being picked by anything or anyone.

I will fight and claw and knock and show up until you see it: You are not just a face in the crowd.

You’ve never been just a face in the crowd.”