Small essays born out of loneliness.
Most nights growing up I laid on my bed wondering if there were some people destined to live miserable lives. People to whom life would always be unfulfilling, with not too many moments of real happiness. Even then, those few lucid moments cloaked in a thick fog of discomfort. After a while, I was wondering if I was one of those people. Maybe you've been thinking the same of yourself.
Most of the time I conceal I'm pretentious. Most of the time, people can't tell and I live discreetly, safeguarding each movie, book and song I enjoy. But then you show up. You are brazen, unashamed, flamboyant, in a hazy mixture of conscious decisions and your own brain's betrayals. Everybody says it to your face, but you continue enjoying whatever you feel like. So you've gone out, studied and practiced almost everything without caring about the rest of the world.
I was eleven, or maybe twelve, when it hit me that I was just a leaf floating in the air, being carried over by the wind coming from whoever happened to blow my way. Not much agency or direction of my own, just letting myself be moved around by the whims of other people.
I always felt distant to everything. Like seeing the world through a thick, tinted window. Everything and, specially everybody, always looked a bit too blurry, forcing me to squint my eyes to make out what was happening. Was I even a human at that point? It didn't feel natural to be that way. Maybe I was just an alien, trying to learn how to behave; trying out every day to disguise myself, afraid somebody would look through my act.
The longer I live, the more dull days I see pass, the more I long for somebody to validate me completely, to accept me whole and give me enough space to grow where I know I'm flawed. To stop receiving support little by little, always having to look for somebody else when we've reached our patience's limit and I still feel starved. Is it too late to just now realize that this is pretty much impossible to get? Nobody else knows what I've experienced the way I remember it, with the same conclusions I have come to. Even people with the same burdens as me haven't been able to agree on everything.
Sometimes I want to call her to tell her about this song I just found. How this artist made a composition so beautiful, so engrossing, that you need to drop your life immediately to experience it. How it reminds me of all those ticks she had, and the way she used to laugh, and the countless times we drove together late at night. Maybe it would've been the right song for our wedding, or it could've been the song we obsessed together for a month, or the artist we fantasize of seeing live someday. Maybe she wouldn't have liked it at all. Maybe it would have become a song that is more hers than it is mine.
I always thought of myself as being trapped inside a dark room. Where there are no windows and the darkness encompasses every object within it. Where I know there is a light bulb, but it is turned off, the switch lost between the mess and my clumsiness. Where I hope there is a door, though I do not know how to reach it. Each day, I'm stumbling through all the furniture and possessions inside, bruising my legs, my arms, cutting my hands when I pick up something I shouldn't have. If only I could turn the lights on, I could get out.