Leaving Home, Again, Like Always
It’s just as hard to leave now as ever. The farewell never gets easier. I still have to suppress certain rises of emotions. Why is it so hard? Perhaps because out there I really am alone, and I’m so frightened by never being understood, again, like always. Life proves that I wasn’t a complete case of hopeless paranoia, because whatever it is that I was paranoid of, I encountered. He hurt me even when I was very kind toward him. I reached my maximal capacity in human sympathy that I never thought I would, trying to understand his humanity and assuring him in every way that he wasn’t alone. Well, I guess I wasn’t needed, that’s all. I guess I assert sympathy when sympathy wasn’t welcome. I guess I just want to feel needed, like I always had the privilege of feeling when I was here at home.
Back out there I’m so small. I’m so easily forgotten by the mad rush of society, by the busy clumps of ashes who always have to quicken their pace to make it through the day, by the ticking clocks that forget what they’re ticking for, for they’re not telling time, but just reminding the onwatchers that one tick has gone by and one should participate for the next tick. Devoid of any tangible connections with this surrounding, I grow so scared, and so desperate to be needed, by someone, by anyone. Need me. Make me feel needed. Validate me. Validate this existence and tell me that I do mean something to someone, that I serve a purpose in the bigger picture of whatever silly grand scheme of this universe. Tell me that I, out here, alone, can and will serve some purpose to someone, something, some cause. Tell me anything. I’ll drink your words up and I’ll bask in the sentiments for hours before the next void of emptiness washes over and urges me to seek for consolation again in another stranger, with whom I never connect with and care for their interests, but with whom I share the universal humanity that has been bestowed onto our wretched body, and make him tell me that ‘honey, without you, I am so lost’.
If they don’t need me, then they don’t love me. What an awful perception of love, the bed of roses, of diamonds and chocolates and smiles and teddy bears. What a contradiction to bear when the modern woman who has spoken these words believe to the core of her bones that she can live on dandily without the presence of others. But maybe not to her bones. Maybe just at the surface of her skin where her belief wanes and once it reaches the bones, that belief has vanished altogether. Maybe her bones, her calcium-rich, brittle-free bones, crave for than anything the presence of others, right now, before they become brittled and broken pieces of minerals that will desecrate through time in the wooden tomb where they will never have any more hope to resurface and rejoin the wretched society above.
She’s not good at being alone at all, she realizes. All these yapping about the solitary introverts, empowered and rise in their own solitude like a mighty phoenix to flash its brilliant newborn feathers, and the obnoxious extroverts, who often are too dumb to understand the concept of empowerment and solitude. They want her to pick side, they want her to be one or the other. Be easily identified, be easily defined, be simple, be concise, be happy or sad, be one or the other. Tell us how you feel, girly, but only in one sentence. Oh why are you crying? but don’t take more than two minutes. Don’t let us see your emotional working machine, don’t let us see your past, your hope, your dreams. Don’t let us know you, but do tell us how you feel, because society dictates compassion and sympathy to be applauded, no matter how insincere they are. Well fuck. what do I tell them? Oh I was very sad because I didn’t get the grade that I wanted. Boohoo, nobody cares for grades anymore, it’s nothing to worry about. Yeah you are right. I am better now! How brilliant was that charade. I live and breathe for them.
Well now here I am. Alone in the airport waiting to get back out there in the world where I am not needed, where I do not possess any real purpose of being alive. But guess what, tonight, when i’m under my sheets in that lonely city, I can dream of a place, a real place, where I am needed and the people there cannot live without me. So that’s it. I guess I am lucky. Now let’s me start counting my blessing. Even if it’s just in singular.
