The Tangled Mess of Ropes

Source: Pinterest

When I was a child, a tangled rope was just a tangled rope. Something to be frustrated about for a moment — then fixed. I would bring it to my mother, or my sister who slept in the same room as me, and within minutes it was loose again, free in their hands. I remember both feelings clearly: the small irritation of finding the knot, and the quiet relief when it was gone. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, that a problem would simply find its way to being fine.

I grew up. And somewhere along the way, I learned to untangle things myself.

For a while, I thought that was what growing up meant — needing people less. The irritation changed shape. The disappointment when your study group has someone who never shows up. Then, the frustration when the person you love in silence still makes you too afraid to breathe even within one hundred centimeters of him. And the loneliness of standing in a crowded room and feeling like a stranger to every single person in it. Resentment. Dissatisfaction. The quiet, maddening kind.

I thought those were the complicated ones. Loud and sharp. Or at least I could name them. At least I knew where they ended. But the worst is the ones that live quietly inside the things you love the most. The ones you only recognize after years of sitting inside them.

Some tangles ask you to stay. To return to the same moment again and again — through one month, then another that looks exactly like the first, then a year — until you can finally see their shape. You sit with it in the corner of your room and ask: why do I keep coming back here?

You realize that the disappointment is wanting so badly for the people you love to be whole, and watching them carry things they never say out loud. The frustration is understanding exactly why they stay silent, and choosing to stay silent yourself, for the same reason. And the loneliness is performing okay so that no one has to worry — even when you are not okay, even in the same house, even in the same room.

What breaks you is not that they are imperfect. What breaks you is that you can see how hard they are trying — how every silence is an act of love, how every buried thing was buried carefully, for someone else’s sake. You understand them completely. And somehow, understanding makes it hurt more, not less.

You watch this for years. Everyone holding their end of the rope. No one pulling. No one asking. Because to speak the truth would be to make someone you love carry more than they already do. So you carry it. You all carry it. Separately, in silence, and somehow together — and none of you say a word about it because that, too, is a kind of love.

I needed twenty-two years to understand that the most complicated tangle is not the one between strangers — but the one between you and the people who were there before you had any say in it. The ones you love so much that you keep choosing them, even when the choosing costs you something. What you bury doesn’t disappear. It becomes the distance. The careful words. The version of yourself you wear at the dinner table, which is a little smaller than who you actually are.

The hardest part is this: I know they feel it too. I have seen it in the way we move around each other — gently, carefully, like people who know exactly where the tender places are. We are all, in our own quiet way, trying to protect the same thing. And still, it is not enough to make it whole.

I used to think that if you just loved people enough, you could smooth every rough edge. That love was the answer to every knot. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe love is what keeps you holding the rope even when you’ve stopped believing it will ever fully loosen.

So I keep returning to a question I don’t know how to hold:

If even here — in the place you have loved the longest, with the people who tried their hardest, who buried things just to keep you from hurting — if even love this careful cannot make something whole —

then why would you ever pick up a new rope?