same old funny feeling

eternal aloneness + late night remembering

It’s a Sunday, probably the worst day to wish something would happen. The weekend has come and gone but I’m tipsy off of one gin and tonic with lime juice which gives the false impression that the night is endless and infinite with possibilities. The truth is I’ve spent almost one year in a country where I’m not legally allowed to drink and I’ve been inconsolably single for just under four months.

I’m what you would call a flight risk. I keep trying to remind myself of the unavoidable yearning that comes with a cheap glass of wine — along with the insatiable need to be anything but alone. But each time it’s just as sharp and aching as the last, like a scraped knee that never quite heals before it’s bruised again. The truth is that the waters of my life are still and I don’t know what do with the quiet lapping of waves I used to be drowning in.

I was on the phone the other day with my long distance best friend who I became internet friends with at the ripe age of thirteen because of a pink-haired YouTuber. In the middle of our conversation I realized how not-depressed I am these days. It’s strange to me because it’s only been a few weeks, but when things are good I can easily forget how bad they were for so long. Sometimes I gaslight myself into thinking nothing bad has ever even happened to me and I have always lived this easy-breezy coconut summer life. And when they get bad again I feel like: oh yeah, this again, here we are. back to business.

It’s weird to feel normal. It’s weird to have dreams and plans for the future and wild ambitions and to online shop for the hell of it.

I was driving home from work and thinking about my mom making dinner and how badly I did not want to get in a car accident. I realized how dear my life is, how much I really do not want to die, and how I have so much to live for that I lost sight of before.

Depression is like going mining in Minecraft and getting lost without a torch for so long that you forget the way out and forget the beautiful world waiting for you above ground. Depression is like trying to breath underwater and swim with ten layers of clothes on.

Getting better is like living in an alternate universe you didn't know existed but read about in all your favorite books.

Something about struggling with mental health is that perpetual feeling of aloneness. No one can be in there with you, fighting the fight within. I carry the hollow emptiness of the last six years in me, the eternal feeling that there’s nothing lonelier than a crowded room. Nothing more alienating than surface-level smiles and sips of gin that bring me further and further from feeling consolable. No one knows the world inside. No one can see the death before their eyes. No, no, I just smile.

This loneliness is like a poisonous fog —

A yearning for someone I have not known.

There are millions of songs and poems about losing the person who loved you like no one else. How can you love again? Or better yet, how can you live without them?

What if that someone is a figment of my imagination?

Fractals and pieces of past lovers, always hazy and smeared with this otherworldly presence of a love I have not known.

I yearn for something to save me, just like I did when I was fourteen and fading into a hopelessness so heavy I went quiet. Just like I did when I was fifteen and starving in a school bathroom. Just like I did when I was sixteen on the sand and my whole world changed within minutes. Just like I did when I seventeen and alone on a park bench with a man whose name I thankfully cannot remember. Just like I did when I was eighteen and naive, living on my own for the first time. Just like I did when I was nineteen and swimming in wine and heartbreak.

Just like I always have.

Yearning for an all-loving essence, yearning for someone to say ‘let’s go, let’s get out of here’, yearning for a father figure and an escape from the ten layers and tears in the bathroom.

I go blind looking into the sun, looking for lovers who will leave when you most need them.

I am always just trying to get to shore.

Not knowing that I am the ocean and I am the sand and I am the yearning and I am the someone,

the only one,

who can save me.

St James’s Park 2023

I still don’t like it that way.

¸.•´*¨`*•✿ ✿•*`¨*`•.¸

And the wine is like pulling weeds from the garden that never grew…... The love that has long gone, left me lonesome and unhopeful Nothing lasts forever, not the first time, or the second Or anywhere down the line. and Maybe i’m a pessimist and a hopeless romantic and maybe I am every inch of aching in this whole country, Because I know that to be alone is the fate we have to face again and again. Knowing that there is no one out there who will really know how to save us, when to come over and take us away from the taunting taste of you’ll never have it Keep hiding, Keep writing with teary eyes in too tiny bathroom stalls, Keep leaving for fresh air alone and hoping that someone will come along and understand Even if for seven years they never have.

---

It’s in the dark before bed when the loose strings of my life slip under the covers and fill me with a childlike restless that cannot be contained. In one week I will be getting on a jet plane and going overseas to resume my seasonal job of wandering through European cities and meeting old friends for cappuccinos. I cannot wait, I’m overjoyed, this year has felt like ten, and now I am better, softer, more still, ready.

It is when summer is blooming and the birds chirp even at midnight that I can come back to all the little pieces of my existence;

All of the glittering seashells waiting for me when I come back to shore, even if it takes nights upon nights of thick, unending loneliness.

---

rolling around in bed
with liquid memories
love in small doses
the last night, 
laying on my back in the hallway
this is what i live on—

a series of pangs in my chest
for all of the people i miss,
the places i cannot be and have not seen
in too many months, years, 
lifetimes go by
and I still remember

roll around in bed
and reckon with the silver platter
a paycheck of sugar from the past,
a clearing on a stone path where you love me and all my dreams come true,
hazy and half-drunk.

not alone, no,
just at home
in a house who hasn’t seen the world 
like i have
who hasn’t loved in bits and pieces
collecting sea glass by the season
no,
i’m never alone,
not with these memories.
not with these dreams.

˚⋆𓇼˚⊹ 𖦹 ⁺｡°