sun soft

it is a serious thing to be alive

Time is arbitrary. It seems unstable sometimes. I often ask myself if there’s a purpose for it, but maybe I’ll never get the chance to know. I don’t think I’ll ever make the right guess. Some days are like that. I have questions, but no answers, and I have observations, but they’re not sufficient enough.

I realized lately that maybe I don’t have to know. Is the whole point of everything in the process of trying to figure it out? Will the answer ever be sufficient when I don’t reflect on all the questions I have? Maybe the lack of answers is just the result of me asking all the wrong questions.

Time is arbitrary, but it is relative. The version of me that has all the answers already exists, in some other moment, at some different time. And at least I can be certain of that.

Life sometimes feels glossed over by a temporary ghost that covers everything like a fog. It’s strange when I notice because I thought I had gotten rid of all the ghosts in my house. I scrubbed the dust off the tables and got rid of the cobwebs.

It’s February 24th and the rain is falling in tendrils, not like drops, but like ribbons coming undone. They patter against my window gently in the early mornings when the sun isn’t out yet. The water glistens once it does. It chastises. I feel like running into it and craving, with it, a new spring.

I study when I have nothing to do. And all that I do makes me feel like I’m stuck at the bottom of a white basin. I tidy my things. I leave out my blankets for when it’s cold, and I’ve rehung my string lights. I’ve gotten better-tasting coffee and the good brand of oat milk that’s slightly more expensive. Everything remains mutable. Quiet. Empty.

I fill and fill my cup. The rain keeps pouring. I feel like I’m gulping down the seconds, swallowing the time. When was the last time I felt vigilant? When was the last time I remember enjoying the rain?

Sometimes the rain will glisten in a certain kind of way and it’ll take me back to last September. I was in love in September, two hours away. The TV hadn’t been set up yet and I still woke up every morning to him making me breakfast. (In the solitude, I follow after my memories like they’re stars and I’ve been in the dark too long. Maybe I have been.

I read somewhere that the body grieves a person too. Maybe I’m not crying about him. Maybe, I’m crying because the person that was shaped by his patterns, and his silences, and fluent in all the languages of his uncertainty is gone. Who am I if I’m not waiting for him? Who am I if not the person attuned to the unspoken language of his unreliability?

He loves me, he loves me not. I kept guessing. In the late nights, I looked in his eyes for any sign of someone else. Over the phone, I wanted to tell him that I always knew he was looking for some other girl. I knew he wanted to cup her face instead of mine. Who am I if not the girl that keeps looking in his eyes, hoping this time, it’ll be different. Hoping this time, he’d be looking for me instead.

I have no new exciting memories in my cup. Just a monotony of quiet things. I think I am the loneliest person on this block, and sometimes, I think I wear that kind of quiet solitude against my neck, pressed against my jugular. I know people can tell because I don’t speak. Quiet I have become and so has my life.

I tie a chord around my wrists and pretend the world is blue again. Blue like the midnight in his car. Blue like I haven’t dreamed about forgetting him. Blue like his favorite color.

The trees shiver in the cold and the silence comes to me in the night. I ask myself, in my head, if I should call him. Then a voice whispers back, what would we say? Would I tell him that I miss him sometimes when I feel armless and soft around the edges? When the anger is gone I’m still soft like sunlight on a stream? Maybe, I just have bad attachment issues. (I think my love has always been revolting and grand. I don’t know how to make it anything different.)

The days drag on. I don’t call him. Some days my eyes are bright and my cheeks are round. I don’t feel like a leaflet in the wind, pale against its whisper. As soon as I begin to ask the question, who loves me? Something tilts inside of me.

I am trapped in the romance of uncertainty. Everyone keeps telling me there’s something special about my life, but I can’t find it. I can’t tell. That’s always been my defect.

When I laugh, I can hear that there’s no ink or injury in the sound. How did I manage to get rid of that? I used to laugh like everything hurt because it did. I used to flicker against the wall like a bad matchstick. Slow blinking, never enduring. What does it sound like instead? Creaky floorboards. A little awkward. Adrift, but not fully gone. Like if everything was sad and beautiful at the same time.

I skip to the next song and talk to the next stranger and laugh from the very center of me. People are acknowledging my wit and I’m using it to hide the carpentry of grief and wonder within me.

Things are good because they are. But they are not all the way right. I’m sitting at a kitchen table, but one of the legs is slightly shorter than the rest. It’s that kind of oddity that I can’t make sense of or describe without tying it to a hypothesis and a dream.

People tell me to let it go, but I have. I know I have because I’ve cleaned out the boxes. I gave away the last hoodie of his I wore and stopped fidgeting with the space along my shoulders where he used to kiss me. I let it go even when my stomach was split like a melon, with my confidence sliding out of me, and harder to catch. I let it go when I made a fist and couldn’t reopen my hand until the full moon passed.

I don’t fight. I am not reckless and hideously tender. The thrill doesn’t break my heart anymore. What do you think letting go means, then? Is it forgetting? Is it pretending like I didn’t love even despite the rupture? Like my heart wasn’t used up and tossed like a pebble? Is it sitting here and telling you that I am so terrified of loving again but I am anxiously excited all the same? Does it look like me admitting that I don’t write him letters anymore when the weed sets in?

What does it look like? Because I don’t know how to be a person without holding all the past versions of myself that I was. I don’t know how to feel full without still carrying the last fragments of people that I really loved.

That version of myself — the one who waited — still exists too. She’ll exist forever. Letting go might just mean that despite her still existing, I have chosen to be different in this moment.

I ask my mom if she thinks he misses me and she says that she thinks he does. Because you two lived something beautiful together. When you listen to a beautiful song, do you forget it?

What I’m saying is, I am trying to stop myself from pulling away out of my body. I am telling myself to stop trying to make the grey disappear. I’ve always been sad. I’ve always felt the sea fever.

Love doesn’t save and rescue as much as I think it does. But it makes things easier. It made my sea fever less noticeable.

If you keep thinking you can give everything away in the hope that someone will give you enough to fix you, then you’d be looking at it all wrong.

I tried it with him and I felt his frightening pulse whenever I cut too close to the nerve. We want people to see everything about us, but we flinch when they get closer.

I don’t think I want to look at love like a saving grace anymore — like romantic love is all that will help me survive… like someone with rough hands and a carbon copy of his smile will cure the fever.

When the next boy comes, I will show him all the organic things about me, pesticide-free, and I won’t look at him like a savior.