I am so sorry. I don’t know why I am writing this. Maybe because I am hugging myself so, this huge wave of sadness, paranoia, and panic that I am feeling might go away, and I don’t like it anymore. My arms are tired, and so am I.
I know I might scare the shit out of you once you wake up, but even typing this out feels like I am lying in your arms and whispering to you in your sleep.
Somedays, my sadness can look like a hurricane resting on my palm that I am fisting like a ball to prevent it from getting away, from being seen. Somedays, it is the tornado, and I am sitting at the center of it, crying and watching buildings and roads being destroyed. I once read somewhere that the loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they see their whole world falling apart, but all they can do is watch. I know I am being dramatic; my world is okay; it’s just like those 5-minute hailstorms that don’t really affect your life. I know the hail will melt, and the sun will come. But sometimes, time stretches like a vast desert in front of my eyes, and it feels endless.
I don’t know what is happening or why it is happening. Why suddenly it feels as if I am not enough, or I will never be enough for anything or anyone. That everything I touch will eventually wilt. The idea of being someone worthy feels so unattainable. I just want to be okay.
I just want to be able to feel the air in my lungs again. There is so much work I have to finish. So many deadlines I have to meet. But this vast sadness is slowly consuming me like a python, and it’s hard to get out of its grip. I can feel my bones turn to mush, my guts hanging out of my body, and my eyes slowly coming out of their sockets.
I swear, I thought I was good at swallowing lumps in my throat and that I would be able to not put you through this. That I would be able to hold on to you without scaring the living Jesus out of you at 3.30 in the morning. But I have become so awfully bad. My habits are ruined. I don’t know how to be alone anymore. All I can think of to calm my mind is how good it will feel to sink in your scent. How good it would feel to have you hold me and listen to music till I can’t hear my thoughts.
It’s so scary, na? To be lost in dreams where you build beds made of grass? Especially when you have a long, winter cough that makes it impossible to sleep for long?
I have so many thoughts inside my head that I feel it’s becoming increasingly incoherent. I don’t know if I am making any sense. I am trying to with words. But I don’t know if they are reaching you.
I don’t know if you will look at me only to find a woman driven by madness.
Still, I keep on typing. Like a child who asks for a couple more seconds before bedtime. Because it feels good to have a place where I can type it out even though I fear you might never look at me the same way.
I just think this is all I am good for. This is all I will ever be. Slowly, I would lose words, I would lose anything that I can call my own, and slowly, you will see me as someone who just wakes up, goes to work, and then sleeps inadequately, and I have nothing special to offer you. Nothing extraordinary, earth-shaking, making it to the pages of history.
I feel like I am good for nothing and no one. That everything good I have is like sand. The more I try to hold on, and take care of everything, the more it is spilling from my hands, making a mess.
These days I just write pages after pages of things that wouldn’t matter, not that I can write anything that would matter anyway, but still. When I try to speak to you, the only thing my lungs want to scream is how much I love you. I have lost poetry, metaphors, and those grandiose symbolisms that I wish to offer.
Would you believe me if I just told you, “I love you?” I wish I could build something or write something to show you that see, see, I love you like its eternity, and I love you like it’s the end of the world in 2 hours.
The more I ramble on, the more I get scared that what I think is leaning on you is actually my teeth sinking into your skin. I hope you don’t see me as a mad woman tomorrow. I hope.
I really want to master the art of carefulness. Not spilling too much and making a mess on the bedsheet and then sleeping on that wet bedsheet in the cold. I hate rambling on. It feels like everything at once and nothing at all, and you don’t know if the person in front of you will feel both or only one. If one, then which one?
Just realized that there are two ways people experience grief.
For some, grief comes flooding in; for some, it spreads like a drop of ink in the water.
For some, grief is like a hangnail. You start taking yourself apart until there’s barely anything left to call your own.
For some, it’s like lying on a grenade after pulling out the key. Then making flower pots out of the shells you picked out of your skin one by one because grief is ugly to look at. You need to present beauty in everything; otherwise, nobody will believe that the circus is actually on fire. The clown is not acting.
There needs to be a metaphor for wanting to lie flat on your bed without doing anything for 8 days straight. Otherwise, they are never grief, it’s just you are just not the perfect bite-size piece for someone’s poetic appetite.
I am sorry. I will go. I hope to see you tomorrow. And I hope I can laugh about it.