I get lost in the hours between waking up and falling asleep. I feel like I don’t know where I go anymore, but I end up at class and in cafes and somehow all these tangible places and moments are connected but I’m never sure how. There’s concrete awareness and understanding and consciousness right when I wake up and right when I go to sleep, but everything else is a meaningless blur of colors and temperatures.
And I’m not sure when it started being this way, whether it was before or after the meds, before or after kati, before or after leaving home. All I know is that one day I’m on the subway and the next I’m here, that three years ago I had a best friend and now she’s dead, that eight months ago I loved someone and two years ago I loved someone and perhaps those feelings never go away they just get lost in the motion.
And every now and then I learn that my closest friend here has been in a relationship for three months I didn’t know about, or that someone I used to date is getting married, or that my brother got his license and I am 1500 miles away writing things no one will ever read on a five year old laptop in a forty four year old building and all of our lifetimes are simultaneously moving and shifting through space and saying anything at all is like screaming desperately into a vacuum.
And that’s what meds feel like, I think. Like nothing matters enough to be sad but nothing matters enough to feel happy. Like I just got hired and saw someone I love but I still feel as empty as I did when I left the house this morning. Like I wish someone could hear me, because I tried to kill myself last year and the world moved on around me. And the meds have restructured my gray matter or pink matter or neurotransmitters or whatever, so that I won’t run into busy intersections or trace lines on my wrists, but now the world looks different.
All the nooks and crannies that were once magic are now void of anything meaningful, and I keep trying to reach out and hold on to anything at all but I’m surrounded by imaginary context. All I see are the lights over Lake Merritt, the sun rising over England, this couple making out next to me while I type this and wonder how people live without having all these thoughts I’m constantly having and trying to stop having.
My brain is filled with broken cassette tapes replaying details of everyone I’ve ever loved and lost. And I get migraines every afternoon because the memories feel like maggots crawling on the inside of my skull. All I want is to open a door to the past and curl up like a cat at the foot of a bed and never leave. I want to build a single day made up of all the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and it would start with a sunrise and end with the sound of a heartbeat.
Last year a lead bullet shattered in my chest. The muscles have regrown around it, but the beat has changed. Every time I breathe I can feel the metal pieces cutting into my organs and I have no idea how to take them out. Like the barbed wire bruises on my shins and the suicide jokes made by the people around me, some things will never change. Letting go is an illusion I can’t seem to figure out so I’m stuck using memories like a crutch for the happiness I can’t feel, for reasons I can’t understand.
It’s some kind of strange constellation, shining light across the universe from a million galaxies away. And I’m stuck with my feet on the ground, breaking my neck from staring so long. So anyway, this has been ridiculously long and vague and probably terrible and nonsensical to everyone else, but I’m not going to re-read it before posting it because it is what it is, and it doesn’t really matter anyway.
It’s just part of the current.