Izze has it completely right. It’s the feeling underneath everything, behind every situation, even when we’re screaming out car windows and driving 100 on the freeway. It’s like a weight on my chest. A couple days ago I learned that we hold our grief in our chests, in our lungs, that’s why it is so hard to breathe sometimes. I believe it. My chest is where I feel everything. It’s where my anxiety comes from, where my excitement takes off, my chest holds the weight that never really leaves, the feeling Izze described while trying to explain how she was happy today but there’s that deep, underlying thing. That’s depression. That’s grief. That’s the mark of struggle. Once you have it, it never goes away. If you’ve never lost, you can’t understand it.
When I say lost I don’t mean the little things we go through every day. I mean losing parts of yourself to time and people, losing someone you love, losing family, losing homes; you can’t lose if you don’t risk anything. If you hold your pride and decide to shut the world out, then yeah, you’ll never lose. Laugh and say I am going through the five stages of grief when I’m merely grieving you, but I live in these stages. I’ve lived in them since I was fifteen. Since I lost possession of my body. You don’t suddenly wake up one day and accept losing, you just forget. We slide between the five stages. This is all theory applied to lived experience. It does not work smoothly.
Josh is asleep, and I’m sitting here, and I feel okay. My life is full but that does not change the underlying feeling. I am living and breathing and resilient but that doesn’t mean the weight ever goes away. Josh has his own weight. Izze has hers. Almost everyone I know has lost more than they have won and that’s a fucking tragedy but I can still feel them a thousand miles away. Phone calls and letters hold us together and I know we are a generation that fetishizes tragedy but we are trying our best.
Sometimes for a while the weight will go away, in the spaces full of love. This sounds cliche and vague and I’m sorry because it’s 11:59pm and I slept for four hours last night and I’ve been running around all day so I’m sorry, but it’s true. I think about the way calling my dad makes me instantly feel better, the way my mom’s texts take anxiety off my chest, I think about the gig cars full of bad raps on bad beats and crossing the bay six times over and I think of Lauren looking out for me and checking in on me and Izze always sending me songs and listening to me scream about my vagina for an hour over the phone and Laurel letting me call her at 1am to sob and I think about all the times I have been held in my life, and the times I have been held safely, and how even if those people are gone there was love in those moments and love heals.
I think about Kati, a lot. I think about how I feel love when I am alone, driving at golden hour, or walking across campus, and for a brief moment the weight is lifted off my chest by no more than the sound coming through my headphones and I know that she is here. I know that even if Kati is no longer physically present on the earth, she can still love me. Even if my family is about to separated by continents and oceans they will always be seven numbers and a dial tone away. I haven’t seen the Big Dipper since the first night I got back, but honestly I haven’t been looking to hard. I don’t need to look to see. I don’t need to see to feel. Sometimes this place feels like it’s made of cardboard but there are so many people filling the space between the walls that it doesn’t matter what any of it is made of or where I’m going.
Everything is arbitrary except love. And fuck, I sound like my parents, but the thing is I was always imagining love wrong. It’s not one person who holds the world together for you. It’s all the people who make up the world around you. I can’t imagine choosing anything else over that. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s what happens once you’ve lost so much. You’re suddenly willing to stay up to make sure someone else is okay, willing to give up more of yourself and your time and your life because it would be worthless without other people.
I’m going home next weekend. I never thought I would want to go home. But I get it now. I miss my parents. I miss my brother. I miss my sisters. I miss going downstairs when I was eight to a family room filled with light and sound and people laughing and joking around. That was family. That was home. We don’t get time machines, but if we did I would go back to that. I wish I could grow up again, knowing what I know now, watch myself walk through life until I end up in this exact chair in this quiet room in a cardboard building full of strangers.
I am proud of what I’ve gone through. I am glad I give so much. Yeah, living hurts a lot. But what the fuck would it be without that? I can’t imagine feeling okay all the time. Okay is such an arbitrary and meaningless and worthless way to describe something as intricate as living and I finally understand what Charlie was saying that one morning over breakfast, about not striving for eternal happiness. Fuck that. There is no pushback. We live at the fringes, we live in friction. Without that there’s nothing. What’s the point if there’s nothing at stake? If you’re not willing to give up contentment for something real? That’s not living.
I don’t know. I live in an existential rut and I’m always thinking about this shit. I need someone to ground me sometimes. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to leave this room, turn out the lights, shower and fall asleep alone, watching the same memories play out in my mind. And honestly, that’s better than okay. I like the quiet.