Finally, I am sitting myself down to write. I’m back at my parents’ for a week or so. Now that I am out from under a two week span filled with challenge and housing stress, I think this is my moment to finally breathe. And yet, the insistent tug of urgency pulls at my sleeves. I can’t seem to settle. I wake up in the night with a start. My chest clenches at every stray thought.
I’m sure someone on Tik Tok wielding the language of psychology and discourse will assure me that my nervous system needs to come down from a prolonged period of anxiety and stress, and I would agree. I do the things, treating my body like the primal being it is. I drink water. I eat till I’m full. I stretch. I cry. I dance frantically and crazed, and, at times, with a water bottle in my hand as a microphone. I hug my parents.
And yet, I can’t help but think that there is some part of me that finds some safety in urgency. It almost feels good to have something gripping your attention and to spend the day putting out fires one after the other. It almost feels good to be absolutely exhausted when the day is done, and to smoke weed, watch TV and drift off to sleep. It feels safe to only worry about your immediate survival and nothing more. My brain feels drained, yes, but also something close to satisfied. I have survived another day. I have been gifted with the illusion of speed and it only took like five years off my lifespan. *sigh*
In these moments of reprieve, when there is no more running or racing to be done, emotions and fears shoved to the side return with insistence. I have abandoned them, and worse I feel, I might have abandoned myself somewhere along the way. The feeling of panic is familiar, it’s that girl you were friends with in middle school. She would make you wish you were never even born, and yet you couldn’t know why you would return to her day after day. What constituted your loyalty to her? Perhaps, dread felt consistent in an ever changing landscape of your body and your self.
It was the afternoon, I was lying on my bed with a heart that was racing with the fever of someone who was being hunted for sport. I decided to massage my chest, to get to the heart of the matter. As I massaged my fist into the center of myself, I started telling myself the truth. “I’m scared,” I sobbed. “Scared I won’t get what I want, scared that everything I desire is just out of reach.” It was trivial maybe, and yet, deeply honest. Almost, child-like in its unbridled honesty. That’s the truth. When reality feels like a knife at your throat, it’s hard to even consider desire, except for the most pressing and immediate, and in that space in-between it all comes rushing back.
That is the funny thing about desire. To be experiencing it, is to have some want remain unfulfilled. It is to have something remain just out of reach. On a long walk across two parking lots to the Starbucks, desperate and thirsty, I thought, what makes me feel more alive?
the moment before attaining what I’m yearning for
the moment during
the moment after
Liminal Spaces
I was sunbathing on my bed, and it occurred to me that there was a very subtle energetic difference between trying to become something and just being it. It was so simple, so obvious. I couldn’t believe that it was there all along.
I thought to myself, I am an artist because I am.
Becoming— the condition of its existence is its absence. Disappearing around the corner, beckoning you like a mirage in the distance, seducing you, brushing its hand against yours and disappearing into a crowded room.
Being— is
I have this unshakable feeling that this small shift is what makes all the difference.
You can hardly make out the outline anymore of my dog's grave by the tree. It has faded into the rest of the grass. The last time I was home was her passing. Someone came to the backyard. One injection to make her sleepy and the other to slip life out the back door. I remember the birds were singing. It is something special to watch something die.
Her absence lingers on the mat by the front door, and the small carpet to the back. To be responsible for something is a great privilege, you only seem to know that when you are relieved of it. I find myself going downstairs and wondering if I should open the door to let her out, my eyes wandering to her corners of the house. This only lasts a moment, but the repetition of care has not yet shaken me loose. I miss her, I really do.
Farewell,
If you have been enjoying it, think about going paid. It’s like the price of an expensive fancy latte. A coffee date between you and me.
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Love you,
-Thai