I will warn you right now: I am not writing because I have anything good to say. I am writing lost.

I had two conversations today with two different friends about two different topics, which all turned out to be eerily similar. They were conversations with people whom I care about and trust, in which I cried and they asked questions and gave advice. This is normal. There are a lot of nice people in my life and also I cry a lot. The general consensus is that Alice is a cuddly, weepy, very-open book.

But both of these conversations were different than usual. They did not spend very long in my familiar little landscape of problems. For some reason both of them veered off towards the unknown—towards places I had not planned for them to go. They were asking questions whose answers are hidden behind walls in my soul.

I did not know I had walls in my soul. I thought I had no secrets. I was frightened. I wanted tell my friends, “No.” I wanted to get up and walk away and never come back. But there are rules and precedents about how you treat your friends and so each of them earnestly scaled the walls and started gently poking around in my sooty heart of stone and its strange, sulfurous crevices of blame.

Their careful questions overturned in me harsh, short answers, and their glaring advice made me writhe. “No, it is dark down here! Do not bring a light—it hurts my eyes!” I wanted to say. “These things are not for seeing—they are for forgetting.”

Finally I told them each that I was waiting. I told them that understanding and healing and all-manner-of-things-shall-be-well would come in God’s time. (So that they should never again try to go beyond those walls. I would not be dragged back there again.)

I’m really good at waiting. At sitting, at being the last found in hide-and-seek, at stagnating, at rotting to dust in the corner.

Before I may live there are many things my God must kill, but before He does that I must admit that they live. But I’m not ready. I can’t. I’m waiting.