David Bronson

We ask a lot of those we love
Sometimes we need to
There are moments (we all know this)
that are so jammed up, so knotted, tense, hell
that the only choice is to lean on someone else or break open
But sometimes the leaning shows itself in another form than you would think,
indirectly

It seems to me that there is very rarely, if ever, a one-to-one, tit-for-tat kind of
correspondence in terms of the exchange of energy
(even though this is what most of us, hopefully, strive for – no one likes to be in debt, for example, and it’s a kind of sickness or weakness to enjoy having others indebted to you)
So the rebound always gets hurt
the secretary gets yelled at for the boss’s oversight
they shoot the messenger, etc. etc.

But sometimes it’s our duty as a spouse, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a teammate or partner
to absorb it
And we do (to let another vent, to stem the flow of vitriol, possibly even out of self-preservation),
and the one who keeps it in gets angry
and it’s easy, in calmer moments, to say to yourself
“well, they have it much worse than I do,
are hurting more than I am, and for longer and more deeply”
and this may very well be true
But it all comes out somewhere, in some way

And always, one of the hardest things to absorb is the fact that you can’t take away someone else’s pain