I’ve been reminded endlessly that the red washing down the bathtub won’t change the colour of sea yet I still yearn to bask in the cloudy nebulous water that echoes the ocean – and to feel free.
It’s an embarrassment how too many people don’t understand that we are weak and fragile, that once people are broken in certain ways they can’t ever be fixed. It’s something they don’t tell you when you’re young and it never fails to surprise me as I grow older and see the people in my life break one by one. I’m beginning to wonder when my time is going to be, or has it already happened?
Uncounted times I would lay awake and visualize the stars above my
head, wondering if somewhere else in the world you’re also thinking about the
same cluster of bright lights, envious of how lucky they are to be so beautiful
up there while everything down here is so ugly. The twinkling of the star light
mimics the same ambiguous intensity as looking into your eyes, the simultaneous
invasion of both vulnerability and safety – an oxymoron in your eyes, how
cliché – true opia with your pupils glittering at me, bottomless and opaque.
Suspended in time, I couldn’t tell if I was looking in or looking out.
I never lied much, but one that really shamed me was how I
convinced you of the only obsession everyone wants: to be in love. Because
everyone thinks that falling in love makes them whole, the platonic union of
souls, but the truth is it’s not like that. We were whole before it all began in
the great scheme of things, then love fractured us and tore us apart.
It’s taken me so long to realise that each passer-by is
living a life as vivid and complex as my own –populated with their own
ambitions, routines and worries. An intricate story that continues invisibly
around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways
to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might
only appear once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blue of
traffic passing on the motorway, as a lighted window at dusk. You used to be my
sonder.
Even though time passes painfully slowly, the desire to hold
on is still there, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a
river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders
float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, I mime the words to
myself, no sound escapes my mouth.. “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.”
Yours truly, Marianne.
