emotional rambling (oops)
It’s currently 2:31 a.m., for me.
Having one of The Times ever. Might’ve been a panic attack for a minute, might’ve been an autistic meltdown, might’ve been a harsh landing back in my body after some heavy dissociation recently.
I put the song “Jacob and the Stone” by Emile Mosseri (both the normal & the slowed version) on repeat and cried my eyes out about various things, including but not limited to:
Humanity is fucking beautiful. The world is a gorgeous place. It’s so enduring. It’s so fragile. It doesn’t deserve what we’ve put it through. We don’t deserve what we put ourselves through. Despite all the shittiness, there is still love and adoration and beauty and gentleness and softness and hope. God, there’s so much hope in every little corner of everything. It’s all around, if you find where to look. In everyday interactions. In a kid on the street fascinated by plants and bugs, in two strangers smiling in passing at one another. Shared between friends throughout casual conversation. In laughter, in tears. In milestones, in progress. In a rose from an old man with a little blind dog at a bus stop.
I got my sketchbook out for the first time in a while. I wanted to draw, or to write, to— just create, something physical. I wasn’t sure what I’d end up with, but I wanted to make something.
When I looked around my room for a pencil, I found one on the bottom shelf of the shelves in my closet, tucked away in plain sight. I picked it up. It had one of those erasers on it, you know, the kind that you put on the ends of pencils. Except, the top of the eraser was torn off, and the eraser-ring that was left was pushed partway down the pencil. The eraser was dry and stiff, too, the kind you know would crumble and smudge rather than, y’know, erase. How odd, I thought to myself. Well, I don’t have any use for that, now. So, I took the eraser off. But underneath?
The wood under the eraser was snapped, separated into two pieces who would’ve fallen apart if not for the remnants of a broken eraser holding them together.
But I, at some point in the past, had cared enough to find the angle at which the splintered wooden shards fit with one another. I had taken the two broken pieces and fixed them as best as I could, and I had used a broken eraser to help hold this broken pencil together again.
And I just… felt so much love, in that moment, for whatever version of me had tried to heal a broken pencil with a broken eraser. I love that kid.
And, god, I can hardly believe that kid could ever have hated themself.
I can hardly believe they tried to hide that part of themself from the world. The care, the love, the kindness, the beauty in such a tiny action. I can hardly believe I’m still trying to undo that hiding.
Sometimes I forget, but it’s nice to have a reminder that that kid is still in here, somewhere.
I haven’t cried this hard in a long time.
I haven’t felt this much in a long time.
I haven’t felt so present and human, in… a while.
It may be small, but I felt the need to share.
Not sure how legible all that is, hopefully most of it is fine. It’s messy, and a little visually bland, but it’s mine, made with a pencil that, years ago, I broke and then tried to fix.
