I bought tickets for a concert though I’m sick in a way you won’t know by feeling my cheek. But I’ve already begged and bothered about needing to stay home from school, from work, from the street from the world from my own face in the mirror whose eyes are full of both sides (contempt) and the (shame). “It’s not your fault”, supposedly, because who asks for lightning to strike right upon their head? Maybe no one, maybe me, in a rumbling field with an umbrella not knowing any better than to think a tree a friend.
And it’s so boring! (It is the word etched into the trunk as I wait, to be struck again, struck better; the undoing of a curse by having it happen twice). But, well, it is tiresome to dream. Maybe even a torture, imagining. There’s only so much of the past, I know, and even less of the repetitive present, and still I’ve never been too good at fiction – and that explains it, doesn’t it?
I post on TikTok about how satan’s not real and someone in the comments screams that the rapture is coming. Several agree. The phrase “spiritual warfare” is brought up and all I feel is envy, towards the mind that engages with real life so easily that they must turn their heads to the heavens to feel something. No, no. I don’t believe in hell either, but I can tell you I’ve always felt a heat beneath my feet.
Once I was in a McDonald’s drive-through with my mother. We wanted blueberry muffins and coffees but when we got to the speakers to order neither of us could stop laughing. There was nothing funny except being alive and we teared up and wheezed through words that just wouldn’t form around the joy: o-one… blu-…stopitstopyouordernoicant!-one blueb-nonosorrytwo…two blu-…. The workers hated us, I know it. What a nuisance it is to suddenly be happy for no reason and have it come at an inconvenient time. Not when you need it most, not when it’s 2AM and you realise everyone you love has a whole life without you, and you try and think of a country you’d like to visit but you can’t come up with any, not even one, so you go on Google maps and spin the digital globe around to the place you were born and God you can’t even read the names of the streets, you can’t even write your name like you’re meant to from right to left, so you follow some arrow back to where you are and the phone knows it’s home, it tells you, and you zoom right in on the roof of your room and maybe you’ve never hated a thing more.
Why couldn’t happiness come then? Crashing in, laughter rummaging through your insides so intensely you wonder if it’s possible to laugh so hard you just die. Worse ways to go, I suppose, than some happiness being too big for your body.
I’ve been trying to broaden my musical horizons, but I just can’t hack it. I listen to Kate Bush embodying Catherine, imploring Heathcliff to let her haunt his soul, and though it makes me tear up I still have to turn it off before the song ends because the shrill of her voice is just too much. I’m like a dog that’s gotten so used to the dull mutterings of the everyday that when I hear the sharp call of something speaking directly to me, I feel insane. I can’t believe it’s a noise that makes sense to others and I can’t believe that I’m not one of them.
I thought about scheduling an email to myself years in the future. Of writing some profound words about how it’s So Hard Right Now but it’ll All Be Worth It because That’s Just How Things Go. And Van Gogh had his ear and Frida her spine and though no, I’m no artist, maybe my hands painting over everything in blue will bring out the colours of something I can’t even see yet. But I couldn’t stand it, the thought of my past self-pleading with me through a screen, all pathetic and sappy and desperate, like she didn’t have anything to do with it at all.
I decide I must be shallow then deep. I must only care about money and success and the material and pray the numbness seep through, because, I told my therapist that existing is insanity and everything we do is kind of made up and to my horror she agreed. Does no one have the answers? Is there no one more than human? I must become a Buddhist. I must get baptised (I say this often to my boyfriend in the middle of panic attacks about the vastness of space, wishing for a drowning that is without death and holy). I must meditate and come off my Valdoxan and get a new psychiatrist (again) and learn to play the guitar and make a mood board and wash the dishes. My hair must be waist-long by summer etc. etc., because that’s when it all happens, obviously. I must take the long way then the short way. I must put an ad in the paper for quick fixes of slow-moving problems and I must NOT click on the emails promising exactly that – not because of the scams, but because of the feeling they give me, that I am getting older and dumber and defenceless against the world. I must not think about the words “heart palpitations” or “expired script” or “if the aliens invaded us, I think they’d be friendly”. I must let someone hold my hand when crossing the road. I must be 20, 13, 3. I must start again.
None of my ideas make sense though. All my plans fall through. My greys multiply and razors line the shower floor, and my boyfriend’s father gifts me a Bible, leather bound with gold engravings. But I fear everything. I turn away cowering even from the face of God, not wanting to be witnessed to exist.
I cry already for years to come, wondering how I will bear it all. I imagine all the years being compressed, the space from last night to next year and next century stacking themselves so tightly until a whole lifetime becomes a single memory; an in breath, the turning of the head from birth to death, not even this sentence left to linger between it.
How does anyone tolerate it, and yet, how does anyone ever let it end? How do you say enough life; enough stars, enough moon, enough birdsong, enough sunsets and sleep-ins and sweet tea and laughter erupting in a McDonald’s drive-through…enough this, me, you, everything? I fear it’ll never be enough, that I’ll reach the cuff and still find myself wanting.
I’ll live forever for the both of us. I’ll stomach the rapture; I’ll live through the warfare. I’ll write emails to our past selves, with no expectations but to just be there.
This is one of the most beautiful intricate things I’ve ever read. You take such big, existential feelings and put them in beautiful, yet simple words. You make even the most obscure events a relatable, understandable experience (which is extremely hard to do).
great flow & feeling