Idle Hours

🎵 Listening to: Palladium — Greyson Chance

I know I could have gone looking for one.

But I remembered how, when I was a little kid, I searched high and low to find one and never did. And after a while, I started to wonder if the world didn’t love me back — like the four-leaf clover eluding me was personal, pointed, meaningful.

This time, I let somebody else find the clover.

They preserve it, and they frame it, and it arrives in the mail. And at first, it feels too easy for something I desire to find me this way — like it’s not as special if I didn’t struggle for it.

Recently, in a flurry of emotional texts about how hard this last year has been, a sweet man held my grief and said to me, “You’re tired.”

That day, I felt just how merciful it is to tell a tired heart, “You don’t have to keep looking, keep running, keep efforting.”

That same man texted me this morning, “You have several people in your life that are willing to carry pieces of you when you’re ready.”

They will bring the garden to me, if I ask, if I allow.

Why does that terrify me? I only slept an hour last night, thinking about that.

This is why, I want to tell him, the four-leaf clover is hanging on the wall now.

Because not everything beautiful has to arrive through pain. That’s how he arrived, too — easily, quietly, without fear.

Sometimes I still look at the clover and I think to myself, “How do I even know that it’s real?” I wonder what it’s made of, if it’s a trick, a ruse — if it was 3D-printed, some kind of an imposter.

But then I remember, the myth is part of what makes the clover beautifully alive under my gaze. To truly behold anything, I think, is to lovingly and gently transform it.

There is beauty in believing, in hoping, in wanting.

When I see green and gold in the corner of my eye, the wall leans closer and whispers to me, “Luck is what happens when you allow the world to love you where you are.”

Love me where I am, then.

Since January, I’ve been setting down my armor — refusing the shapes that I used to assume, when I was convinced I couldn’t be beautiful and exposed at the same time — and I let this man take me in like a nude model, to appreciate me where I cannot hide.

Every day I am undressed, undone.

I’m a lucky man holding 2000 miles between us like they’re 52 cards, waiting to see if I’ll fold for somebody who doesn’t play games.

I run in circles; he just beholds me.