love, read, write

Lei tells me to trust my guts. It’s strange, though. Can’t explain it in quite the right way. I’ve tried writing it into some journal a few times but that notebook is lost somewhere in the dumpster, probably when I was cleaning the flat and got too lazy to actually look through the boxes I had laying around.

It’s been a while. I’ve long since abandoned my futile efforts to come to terms with this strangely unshakeable feeling. For some time I thought it was normal. Maybe it is. But I look around and nobody seems as stressed as I feel--or as haunted, I should say.

Haunted? That’s where it gets a little hazy. Haunted isn’t the right word. Haunted makes people think of those movies, translucent figures of death resembling past lives, bobbing around us “mortals,” trying to fulfill some sort of destiny, exact some revenge, pass on some desperate message. That’s not how it is. I think. I mean, people have tried to prove those kinds of haunts exist. It’s silly. Once you’re dead, you’re free from all responsibility. Why would you come back anyway? Who even cares after that?

It’s this--I don’t know. I just feel like I’m haunted by something--or the absence of it. Like there’s this metaphorical cavity cutting through organs and bones and veins and I walk, every day, feeling the air swish around in it, stagnating and bouncing off the architecture of the hole to make eerie little whistles between the cracks. Like if I put my hand into my mouth and dig deep enough I might be able to feel the walls of the cavity, feel the pulsating flesh inside of me, the hot air moving between my fingers. And my hand will come out clean because there’s no blood there. No me. It’s an absence. It’ll be just like putting my hand in a sterile, empty box.

I mean, it’s fine. I function normally. There’s nothing entirely abnormal about this feeling--it’s just this strange conviction I’ve grown accustomed to. That there’s something inherently missing about me, something integral to my life that I just haven’t gotten (yet? Don’t know if yet is the right word because it implies certain arrival in the future). I have a social life, friends, a job, education, all that. Just your standard disillusioned millennial swimming through the viscous bigot-filled snot pool of society. In sum, I’m doing alright.

And there it is. I’ll say I’m alright and momentarily it’ll occur to me that maybe I’m actually not alright. I’ve been living my life the wrong way. And that whole cascade of memories will come back to me and I won’t see my life as a line but a choose your own adventure path where I’m landed right in the middle, scoring a measly 66% because I didn’t make the right choice when Johnny asked me what pizza I wanted during his fifth grade birthday party twelve years ago. And god, that mistake I made when I told Sarah I didn’t need to room with her because I had my own place. Or the way I settled that argument with my now ex-girlfriend.

uninvited. a hand
threading through thousands of
tightly knitted thoughts
rips apart holes open their mouths
yarn frayed
pattern unmade to
utter dismay,
saw it coming
(blurred figures and
no choice but to endure the
uninvited).
strings came undone,
felt uncovered (cool breeze
touching my skin--
but i felt ice,
it bit me everywhere
slits slicing open from
the cutting air),
didn’t know what
to do,
even if it happens so
often, so uninvited.
sit still and shiver,
shame shackling me to
my beady-eyed stare
into space
unending;
i wait
for it to pass
before i pull out pieces of
old cloth to patch the holes
i have made.

dream (v.)

1. to be haunted
   it looks me in the eye everywhere i go. i’ve tried leaving countries and following people, throwing away instinct down the drain but the drain isn’t as far as it goes because it comes back up and i see it sitting at the other end of my bed when i wake up in the morning. its wit is deceptive; i’ve fallen in love and i know it is my own fault. it hides in the space between my shadow and the ground when i walk and i can feel its weight behind me as i drag my dark outline, twice its weight because of the amount of ideas that i have fed it.
     
2. to be hungry
   harrowing. i can’t say i’ve attempted to relieve this sensation, this gut-itching soul-growling insatiable feeling that i cannot let leave no matter how many times i scratch my skin. i can dig to the bone but it will do nothing. there is no fight or flight in this one; it is fight or die or die trying. i’ve eaten so much of the wrong things but i feel as if i have had nothing since birth.

It hits you like a truck. In retrospect, maybe a few years later, you’ll recall it as a gradient--a gradual lapping of ideas starting from a careful consideration to a slow-paced crescendo to a forte of exclamation points punctuating your night sky with red flags that you cannot ignore. But the truth is that it hits you like a truck, like a big costco truck hauling furniture and fridges into the warehouse and you suddenly jump between the doors and the driver and you’re, well, hit.

But you can’t say you hadn’t seen the truck coming. You knew it was there, several yards away. Just like you contemplated the idea of Sarah as someone more than a friend. Just like you once thought maybe Jane liked you in a different way, the crimson blush heart palpitating kind of way. You brushed them off the table like insignificant pieces of dust. You didn’t know they were pieces of you trying to whisper to your brain for their attention.

You’re jarred. Pieces of you shamble to the ground, little shards everywhere on the streets. You scramble to glue yourself together, but you realize upon examining the little parts of you that the truck was right when it whispered to you from far away in the far abysses of the night as you stared to the infinite black plastered on your 3am ceiling; you aren’t who you always thought you are. You’re so much more.

Suddenly the world makes sense to you when that truck hits you. The sun shines brighter, the sky is bluer, maybe the leaves smell nicer on your way to class as you pass by the same big tree sitting in the middle of the field. It is suspicious. Maybe you’re seeing things. Maybe the world isn’t better or happier than it was before; maybe it’s just all in your head.

You keep some pieces of you in your pocket after the crash--pieces that you don’t glue together when you reconstruct yourself after the impact. You leave little holes in yourself just so that you could keep those few shards in your pocket, shards that you’ll rub your finger against in moments of solitude when you need to remember that maybe the brighter tint in Ellie’s blue eyes is not a figment of your imagination. You’ll look at your shards to remind you of the parts of you that you forgot about, the parts that you neglected, the parts that you didn’t know you had hidden inside of you all these years.

Maybe you don’t understand the shards that you hold. What about them compelled you to keep them in your hands and not back in the gaping holes in your left shoulder, your right thigh, the small of your back?

The world is too big and you are too small and you hold too many indecipherable universes for you to lift each shard up to the sky and examine them under the sunlight. You fear that maybe if you do, it’ll dissolve and you’ll lose it forever. But in your pocket they weigh you down, keep you on the ground, remind you of that day you were hit and the day you remembered who you were.

Their jagged edges scrape against your dry skin as you dive face-first into the world, armed with your forgotten pieces never to be forgotten again.