How I feel things

[feelingamixture]

Another way I’m trying to get over that single second. 

[feelingamixture]

I hate you, second.

How do you decide who you want to be? No, I don’t mean if you want to become a dentist or an artist. How do you decide if you want to be strong? If you want to cry? If you want to give up or if you want to be in control? 

You wonder, how did I end up here? In a cramped hospital waiting room, a sixteen year old hugging your stomach begging you to make the pain go away. I guess in a moment as such, you have no time to decide who you want to be. 

Everything went silent when I heard the doctor call out the time of death and it was merely the screams of my little brother that brought the world into focus again. It was that single second of silence that followed “Time of death, 6:38 am” that changed my life. There was me before that second, and me after that second. A me that I still don’t recognize almost three years later. 

I always wonder why I did not give myself the right to cry. Why was I not strong enough to push everyone away and cry for her. To let myself feel the pain I deserved to feel in that moment. Was it fair for me to render my feelings of grief, agony and heartbreak as inconsequential simply because I grew up being told that I am strong and an inspiration? 

Or did I do it for the little boy hugging me so tight, with hands that told me that I am all he has left. That he needs me. In a cramped hospital room flooded with tears and screams of a little boy who just lost his mother, I decided there was no capacity for any of my tears. 

Every single moment I spend in silence brings me back to that single second. That one stubborn  second can recapitulate for hours, days and even weeks during which the world disperses into nothing but a background image. Still. 

There is something malignant about a split second during which your entire life changes. The second passes and you’re left living the rest of your days wondering if the choices you made were the right ones. If you were fair to yourself and how you’re meant to move past a single second that changed every single second you need to live through for the rest of time. 

[feelingamixture]

The sketch I made that night, on my iPad. I got back home, extremely high and concerned about trees walking towards me. 

[feelingamixture]

Spidey, I’m as high as the nyc buildings you’re swinging off

I remember the very first time I was in this position, observing the physiological changes to my body with aching curiosity. It was one of my very first times using public transport, perhaps even the first. 

Was it the first? I believe it was. Did I really use the bus for the very first time in my life to purchase weed? I guess anybody would find it more comical that I used the bus for the very first time at the age of twenty. Picking out my phone from my pocket with cold hands, I remember struggling to text my boyfriend who was all the way in Dubai. He was asleep. I called him anyway. I told him I was about to get high very soon and I did not need to say anything further. After cutting the phone, he sent me all the answers to my questions over text, and I did not even need to ask a single one. 

I made sure to emphasize to the cashier that I would not like to smoke. It makes me cough. My lungs feel ashy. I’m also always learning about human anatomy and cell biology. Inhaling smoke makes me hyper analyze what those particles are doing to the alveoli in my lungs and the smooth epidermal skin of my esophagus. I decided to go with a salted caramel chocolate bar and a lemonade. Both of them came in packaging that resembled rat poisoning. 

On my desk, I took a bite of the salted caramel chocolate and it was way too tasty to not finish. A whole bar, nibbled away by a girl who claims to be smart. I waited for my pizza patiently, while the sounds of “Spiderman; into the multiverse” echoed in my dorm room. I felt as if I was on a roller coaster, the colors and glitches in the movie entrapping me, making every nerve in my body feel as if it was melting with the next. 

I first knew of fear when I stepped out of my building looking for my delivery man but instead wondered if the trees began walking. My breath was more erratic and I could feel my heartbeat but the very girl who knew everything about control failed to confirm whether the trees began moving towards her. And I wondered, if Spiderman was here, how would he deal with moving trees? Would he swing off of them? No, surely not. This would be one of the moments he would decide to save the day. 

I'm blinking rapidly now. I don’t remember getting my laptop out. It’s the smell of  cannabis that is currently saturating this room, making me wonder if those trees were moving or was it just me moving towards them. They did have legs though. Feet wrapped in fuzzy socks and Nike foam slides. 

[feelingamixture]

How far my person is from me. 

“As contraries are known by contraries, so is the delights of presence best known by the torments of absence.”

-Alcibiades

[feelingamixture]

In my room right now, another night of missing him.

I began this journey in February of 2021. I say “I”, but really, we embarked on it together. Sometimes, my own emotions are so overwhelming that it becomes tough to imagine another person experiencing the same longing, urgency, and love from across the world. When he made me his person, and a part of his family, I was swept away in an ephemeral permanence. Concrete ground, a hard base to fall back on. And I do love laying on the ground. For lack of a better word, I find it grounds me in times of distress. As to the ‘why’ and quickly after, ‘what the hell’, this digression begets another post. For now, I’d quite like to bask in the warm memories created between the fall of 2020 and the following semester. ‘Autumn leaves shed as the world fills with red’.

Love is a funny thing, you eat, work and sleep constantly a moment away from the ever growing quicksand of thoughts teeming in your head about your lover. You like someone, and then all at once, you find yourself enamored by their every move. For a person you hold in such regard to place you at the center of their world inspires an almost giddy demeanor. I spent those five months constantly at his side. We enjoyed many firsts together, and when it came time to go, we scribbled cardinal rules in a scrapbook I had curated to enshrine our budding relationship. Now, I am well aware that the game of life cares little for the plans of its players. I am also tuned in to the relative insanity that the notion of ‘Rules for long distance’ carries in the sight of love. Regardless, we ploughed on and set expectations, finding common ground in our (my) numerous asks. We relished in the face of a challenge and laughed at empirical pitfalls. ‘No one has felt a love like ours’. 

And then I was gone. A day-long journey to the other side of the world. I did not know it was possible to be addicted to one’s scent, their warmth, the feeling of their chest under your head as you fall asleep, but most importantly, I did not know the emptiness that would greet me as I began my new journey. 

The emptiness comes the very moment time stands still as he walks away from me at the airport and the world begins to feel quiet without him near me. 

I do sometimes wonder if my early twenties should be spent never feeling fully content. Every night out, I spend thinking of how it would have gone if he was with me. Every couple I see in this city holding hands, I imagine the two of us there instead. There were days I did try, convincing myself that our love isn't going anywhere but the days I have right now would not return. Yet, everytime I did step out, the realization hit me that nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it. 

And as the days go by, I find myself waiting to see him again. I count the hours until he wakes up. Everyday, when I do finally get a chance to hear his voice everything in the world disappears. The worries, the anxiety, nothing feels as overwhelming anymore. In those moments I think of how he fixed me in ways that no one else could ever be able to. So who am I, to let a love so special go?