It took me eight days to write about the past month because I reminisce like a ghost, sensing time flying past me like a veil of transparent ignorance. I can recall how to enjoy a lot of things: Meeting up with friends again because the situation has improved in my city, I caught up with old friends who visited for a day or two over coffee outside a coffee shop in Central, and I spent more time with my sister and mother who has now migrated all of her plants onto their new balcony. I enjoy the rain when I wake up to the sound and smell of it coming through my tilted window. I love staying underneath my sheets because it’s too cold on misty mornings to get up. I write words that I am proud of in between the pages of my manuscript.
Being by myself feels a bit more lonely now, and I can’t pinpoint why exactly that is. This problem has never occurred before, and maybe it’s not something to be solved nor fixed, but something to simply accept. Therefore it would not be a problem, but a thing that just happens, and I can go on with life with silly simple shrugs.
It’s nothing personal when I say, I love spending time with you but I don’t want to be spending time with you. Ironic enough: what makes me feel at ease is being there for people who feel less lonely with me there. We can sit in silence, too. Is it personal if I feel okay with some people, less okay with others? Is it something to be fixed or to be accepted? How is that fair? If it’s not, is there acceptance? I don’t want to change people as much as I don’t want them to change me.
I have stopped writing down the bad stuff in my journal because I realised I don’t like to relive bad things, but I do love to relive the things I think about when I want to smile. That’s why I read over old messages, old compliments, old textual displays of affection. I don’t know where the bad stuff goes, and maybe it comes back to me in a wave sometime in the future, but at least I don’t give it a platform just yet. Therapists may disagree, but it’s working for me.
As you can tell, my thoughts rattle inside my head like toys come to life, spinning out of control. I feel like a dancer on a dark empty stage of an opera house, spinning on my toes without the shoes I’d need for it, without the music playing for it; it’s just my breath echoing against distant walls. I’ve never felt both at ease and so stressed out at the same time in the absence of something.
I stop to take a deeper breath and sit down on the stage, my legs wet from the sweat from trying. I have worked hard to remain patient in the current shaky state of my mind where I have forgotten what is mine. My words in poems and prose, the books I read on public transport, the films I watch with and without subtitles, my place. But my time? My feelings? Not a clue.
I muster just enough patience to please other people who are in more need of it than I am. I am only human so I want to please others, but it is because I am human that I gasp for a reset each night, waking up no wiser, no calmer. My head throbs without a pause, like a pulsing night club, but my heart swells at the thought of being useful. I brace myself for all the upcoming jumps, making sure I know how to twirl.