I miss you in fistfuls

I miss you in the quiet hours. When the day has yet to rear its head. When everything is blank and still and lonely. I miss you when I drive home at night; the sky is open, your heart is closed. It has always been so.

I miss you when I fall asleep. It’s an angry kind of missing, a drunken, violent, spitting kind of missing. I miss you in fistfuls. I miss you in gasps. I miss you in moments.

I miss who I thought you could be. Not the person you are. My idea of you never existed, he lived in the beams of sunlight peaking through my blinds and in between the pages of my journals. He flitted out of sight. I wish I could trap him in a jar and keep him close; the fantasy you fed me. The you I wanted to see. Never the one that existed. Never the one in front of me.

I do not miss your shattered soul. I never want to see it again.

I’ve outgrown you

Image: qi bin

When I was 20 I thought I had fallen in love with a boy. He had sharp cheekbones and expressive eyes and I wrote him countless poems, trying to somehow show how I felt. I think he wrote me one back – a strange, sad sonnet, stuffed into the back of a blog that I stumbled upon months after our demise. It described me as “subversive”.

I think that’s the best way anyone has ever described me.

Subversive. Insurgent. Renegade. Agitator.

Like I somehow managed to revolutionise his entire outlook on life.

I don’t think he meant it like that at all, but I’ll take what I get from the lovers who’ve lost me.

When he left it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I can still remember clutching my heart on the train home, sobbing over how unfair everything seemed to be. It was all so raw, so painful, so desperately sad. I think I described myself as a “rubbed raw, icy footed, miscommunicated mess”. I think I described him as “right and good and lovely”.

I think everything was a little too dramatic to be honest.

3 years later, I am completely healed from my brief cosmic dalliance, this dance with desire and despair, and sobbing his name repeatedly on public transport. I found myself a million miles away from the person I was on that train platform, light-years ahead of the me who considered that boy to be the best thing that had ever happened – because better, more exciting, kinder things have happened since. I found myself in a bar belting Wheatus and having my hair lightly ruffled by a mutual friend. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes and told me that he thinks I’ve outgrown the person who made me feel all those things.

Do you hear that? I’ve outgrown him.

That’s so wild. I used to be convinced that I never would, that I’d stay stuck on that train platform forever, that I’d be devastated and miserable without that little patch of sunlight shining on my life.

But I breathed through it all. I breathed and I lived a little bit more each day and I discovered my own resilience in the midst of my disappointment. Then eventually I stopped telling myself to breathe, I just did. I stopped choosing him and chose myself instead. That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Like I should have been choosing myself from the start, I should have remembered the golden rule of “I am number 1 and everyone else must fall in line behind me”. I think when you’re young and someone kisses your palms like they hold entire galaxies, you start to believe that the universe can only exist within you if they keep telling you it does. Turns out the cosmos have been lying dormant in my chest this entire time, waiting for me to acknowledge their perennial existence regardless of whether or not that other person reminded me of them.

In two weeks time none of this is going to matter. You are going to be breathing despite your doubt, you are going to find everything a little easier. Your patch of sunlight is going to expand with each dust-mote and beam that finds its way onto your bedroom floor, you’re going to be okay.

Just keep loving yourself, and loving the people who ruffle your hair and tell you you’ve grown. Just keep filling yourself up with good human connection, and trust whatever process you believe is out there, because there is one.

You’ll be okay, there are asteroid belts wrapped around your lungs and super novas in your soul. You’ll be okay.

My god, please stay.

My head’s a little fuzzy from all the positive reassurances I’ve been feeding myself since 11 last night. They’ve managed to fill my cranium with white noise, bumping into each other every few seconds, trying to squeeze themselves into tight spaces to make room for the demons who are hosting them.

Hello. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy, trying to fill my days with as much thought-numbing joy as possible before all the monstrous thoughts come back. I’ve been happy, so happy. I’ve shaken my fists at gremlins and run down stormy avenues in rain boots – shaking poetry out of my hair and out-sprinting every anxious pang I’ve ever held captive in my chest.

But happiness has a nasty bite. It roars and shakes it’s dreadful mane, daring me to beg it to stay.

My god, please stay.

I don’t want to be left alone with this terrible wave inside me, let me cling to you for a little longer.

I’ve had this pounding ache since 11 pm, a precariously explosive bubble of emotions that I’ve weighed down with an iron anchor.

Don’t you dare escape, do you want to expose us? Stay still and quiet, don’t erupt, don’t scream, don’t show him or anyone else how much you’re hurting. Shut up.

“I am spectacular, I am smart, I have worth, I am not falling apart, I am going to tackle this with the tenacity and stubbornness of a mother-freaking grizzly bear.”

No matter how this turns out, whether the raging winds and torrential rain tear me apart or leave me just a little battered- there is still life within my veins. I will rise, I will eventually thrive, I will guard my heart with an iron casket next time something like this happens because I can not afford to let hurricane emotions whisk me away again.

If you’re going to go, then go. But if you want to stay then please, please do.

Kid, you gotta love yourself.

source: weheartit.com

I got to spend time with one of my favourite people this January which is significant as we’re currently averaging on seeing eachother every 700 days. The distance between Canada and South Africa is a bit awkward for visits to be more frequent, so we make do with the time we have.

We met on his 15th birthday, I was 14 and obsessed with side-fringes, converse sneakers and bright skinny jeans. I thought jumping off a golf cart would look super cool and ended up with a spectacular face plant to leave a lasting impression. He has therefore essentially seen me at my worst and most embarrassing- it’s been 6 years of tripping over my own feet, running head-first into fire places, acquiring various black eyes and dropping a number of objects he has chucked at me to realise that not a lot of people have seen the parts of me that he has.

When I was 17, I got to spend almost 2 weeks with him in Kenya. It was 10 days of constant exposure to the pros and cons of a particular human being. We both learned the colours of each other’s anger, we spent a full day in the hot sun after getting half an hour of sleep and by the end of it were bickering more than usual, we spoke about our respective futures like they weren’t right around the corner and some days when we ran out of topics of conversation, we’d sit in silence until the things we desperately wanted to say came bursting out of us.

We had such a moment this week. It was hot and we had stopped talking for a bit. He was lounging on the couch that I had my back pressed against and I was feeling rather conflicted about the emotions that were running rampant in my chest. He looked at me like he knew what I was thinking, I stared back, trying to figure out how to phrase my crazy.

“Do you think that someone can wake up one day and just stop missing you?”

He gave me a skeptical look, a constant calculation shooting off in his head, I’d told him about everything that’s happened and how I’m still trying to figure out where I fit, he knows me well enough to say the right things. So he leaned over and flicked the bottom of my chin before stretching back and uttering this resonating statement:

“You don’t need to be missed Harriet. You have to learn to be autonomously happy, regardless of whether you are missed. You can’t tear yourself apart being emotionally dependent on anyone.”

He knows me. God, he knows me. He knows how easily I leap into my emotions like they haven’t let me down before, he knows how I feel about effort, how desperately I cling to any hint of romanticism. It’s been 6 years and countless mistakes and so many letters home trying to figure out why I like my life to be filled with intensity- and the man summed up what I needed to hear in 3 succinct sentences.

I do not need to be missed.

I need to have autonomous happiness.

I can’t afford to tear myself apart.

I can’t afford to tear myself apart.

 

Too Much or Not Enough? An Existential Tragedy.

I’ve been going through the motions of having an existential crisis for several months now. I think it started when I was ejected from my mother’s house at the end of my incredibly sheltered high school career and dumped in the middle of what can only be referred to as “The Ghetto” for the start of my new life as a fresh-faced, relatively experimental student.

After at least 18 years of having morals stronger than Dwayne Johnson’s pecks and crying whenever I came in contact with a drunk person (okay, once, it was one time), I found myself wanting to style my hair into dreadlocks, date guys who wear spiked collars (it was a 2 week phase, I don’t want to talk about it) and became immediately “one with the universe”. My dabble with accepting everyone and anyone into my “Island of Misfit Toys” ended with me dating a complete lunatic (minus the spiked collar) who liked trying to communicate with ghosts in graveyards, tears and a lot of angsty poetry.

Now, a year later: my hair is a normal colour, I’ve stopped believing that crack-heads should be “accepted into society”, and I’m actually using my brain. I’m still in the middle of a crisis regarding my place in the universe but at a much more toned down level (thank fuck). I’ve become myself again with the added bonus of keeping myself awake at night trying to fit pieces of my existence together. This constant state of acatalepsy has led to some sound conclusions on how shit works around here.

It all started with him, the way he makes me feel and how desperately I clutch to any thought that doesn’t involve at least a sliver of his presence in my life. My brain embodies a quote favoured by white girls “my thoughts can not move an inch without bumping into some piece of you”  and it’s excruciating. I miss having my conscience all to myself, but that’s the risk that comes with suppressing years of unspoken feelings; they eventually burst out of their constraints and run havoc in your mind. Unrequited inadequacy can make you crazy.

It’s also made me consider the fact that the world is very much divided into two kinds of people: Too Much and Not Enough.

I am Too Much. We’re the people who engulf our souls in an excess of light and life. We’re too wild, too loud, too emotional, too impulsive. If we’re doing a Meyers-Briggs assessment we’d be more “F” than “T”. Society percieves us as over-the-top and eccentric, we just consider ourselves ablaze with whatever passion sets our spirits on fire. In terms of relationships we often try to make ourselves smaller to fit the other person’s idea as to how we’re supposed to be. Alternatively, we end up with a Not Enough: someone who doesn’t fill the burning void we have inside of us. They don’t talk enough, or feel enough, or read enough books. For the same reasons that we’re Too Much, they’re simply not enough.

I’ve started involuntarily placing the people in my life into these kinds of categories. In their relationships with other people are they more likely to be too much or not enough? My November fling is Not Enough, I was Too Much for my old friend from High School, the guy in French class who tried to attack kiss me is Not Enough, the bat-shit crazy ex-boyfriend is Too Much for everyone. It’s depressing to think that we, as members of the human race, who are sold dreams of being heterogeneous entities, unique just like everybody else, can be classified into 2 personality categories.

I’ve found a paradox in the theory. As it turns out you could be the most Too Much person on the entire planet, you could smother yourself to sleep from all the emotions in your over-exerted heart, you could burst into people’s lives with passion and drive and start singing randomly like you’re mother-flipping Ferris Bueller, you could feel insane and half-drunk on how much you are as a person. You could be Too Much, and yet, when someone worms their way under your skin, kisses you and then leaves you outside to deal with the starlight and the cosmos by yourself, they can make you feel like you’re Not Enough.

That’s my existential tragedy. I can read all the right books, watch all the good shows and show interest in all the right things; I can start gyming and doing my hair nicely in the mornings and stop wearing sweat pants to lectures. I can try to be more than Too Much as much as I want, and I’ll still never be enough.

So I’ll have a shower, put my sweat pants back on, get under the covers and pretend like I don’t notice how incredibly inadequate he makes me feel. I’ll wake up and I’ll be gentle with myself and hold onto the notion that I am white hot and consumed with being Too Much for everything and everyone.

And hopefully one day he’ll wake up and realise that he was simply Not Enough.