to: life
i will take you. i will love you, again
Summer’s ending and I feel like I’m living my life backwards. Or that I haven’t actually moved forward at all. It’s the small things— I’ve been listening to the same music as I did when I was 15 years old, as well as the big ones— I still don’t know what comes after. That’s normal right? Right. Yeah it is, I suppose. Who knows for sure what comes next, anyway. It’s stupid to think you do. I don’t care, though— I need to know that I’m doing something I want to be doing, this time next year; it’s driving me insane not knowing. It feels like everyone around me is coming into themselves, finally figuring out what they want to do. I feel so ridiculously transparent, as if one look at me and they’ll all know everything I’ve been trying to push under the rug. The rug’s not that big, and besides, there’s a lot under it already.
My brain feels scrubbed raw and rusted all at once. The clock reads 01:11, summer’s ending and I have never felt worse about myself. I’d been putting off writing this substack for a terribly long time, so it’s kind of poetic (but also not) that it contains everything I didn’t want my first substack to, and doesn’t have anything I did want it to. I’ll save them for the second.
This is my last year of school, the last ‘school summer’ I’ll have, and it was the Worst, capital W and all. Everyone, namely my dad & teachers, talks as if life is a race and somehow everyone has to come first. Sad that I’ve never liked races. I don’t like most things I’m not good at, it’s a bad habit I’m working on.
My friend and I were talking about the idea of ‘love’ and ‘being in love’, a while back. She said, if we as a society weren’t exposed to the idea of love, it wouldn’t exist at all. Seems like a chicken or egg question to me, but with a clear answer, if you think about it. Humans are inherently made to love, we fall in love with every thing. A song, a movie, a color, a place. We tend to make it ours. It’s endlessly fascinating. Even people who’ve only lost, and lost more, have things they call theirs.
‘Being in love’ is a different thing altogether, I think. Or maybe not, maybe it does feel like having someone that’s yours, someone that slots into place between the edges and corners of your jigsaw.
I didn’t tell her all of this, of course. It’s rambling that’s basically going around in circles, now that I’m reading what I typed out. Saying anything about myself aloud feels like giving too much away, I don’t know how to feel about that— another thing pushed under the rug.
One thing at a time, right? I’m trying that out. Pulling out one thing at a time, turning it around in my hands, like a child with a glass object. The light reflected through it seems to urge me to actually sort through things. I have a year, that’s 12 months, 365 days, 8760 hours, 525,600 minutes, 31,536,000 seconds— that’s what google says, at least. All those numbers mean more time.
Nothing’s the end of anything, as long as there’s time, I think. Summer is still here, the air outside in the veranda is tinged with life, tomorrow is a new day and that’s enough for now.
i would like to put this in an envelope, wrap it with a ribbon and squeeze it against my chest. the feeling of non-existence, the feeling as if you are just the observer of the passage of time.
feeling transparent. that is such a good way to describe it. <33