note: this was a low point!

Sonder is my favourite word. Perhaps it’s the fact that this is my last year at school, in this deceptively sheltered microcosm of the world, but I’ve been thinking about the fleeting intersections of lives a lot lately. And I don’t want to be a solid block of flesh; I want us to be fluid, ever-expanding auras of mellow blue and hues of red and purple, intermingling in the air, unconstrained by space and time.

I haven’t written in a long time, properly. Seven months, to be exact. I haven’t written in a long time because nothing I wrote felt real; I didn’t feel real; maybe I wasn’t real, the amalgamation of subconscious pretenses. How things have changed. I remember being six, waking up one day in bed only to process the strange all-consuming vastness of the fact that was, is, that I am a person with a finite lifespan but a whole life nonetheless, held to account for all the choices I was to make, could make. I remember pinching myself and being in acknowledgment and awe that my mind controlled my body, that I could will my fingers to move, just like that.

And then I went back to bed. Right now I’m sitting in bed, under the warm glow of my lamp.

I’m rocking The Gangster Look: grazed chin, bloody knee, chipped tooth. And it’s really not as bad as it sounds, except physical injuries make me emotionally vulnerable and I’ve been getting a lot of them recently. Today I fell on the rocky cement running down the hill in my favourite loafers (black, gold-buckle, New York); I ran because I wanted to ice-skate and lately I’ve just been so impatient, impatient with myself, impatient with The Wait, impatient with time itself. I hobbled to the rink anyways, put on my skates despite the bloody knee, told myself I needed to do something intentionally reckless to compensate for the unintentional. For a while I felt like I was in my element, gliding on the ice, carving familiar patterns into the ground, patterns which would then be inevitably erased by the resurfacing. At least there was the transient loveliness of it all.

Then the crushing loneliness settled in. Most of the time I bask in my solitude; loneliness is a foreign word. Today, however, amidst professional skaters, falling children and a whirlwind of hand-holding, I just stood there, motionless, because the bloody knee was painful and I felt foolish and insecure, having willed my legs to bring me to the rink out of stubborn determination. So naturally, I sulked.

Saturday night, Aimée and I, before the Fall.

If you came to the afterparty that followed in a nearby park, you’d see a curious cloaked figure treading (stomping? strutting?) across patches of mud and grass, and then speed-circling atop the ledge of a fountain; in the distant corner of your eye, you’d see her friends huddled together, laughing. What you wouldn’t have seen, though, was the inexorable self-pity that engulfed her: mocking, pathetic, destructive.

Eventually I became bored of sinking my feet into mud. I made my way to the crossing, cars whizzing past, blurring into the backdrop of the weeping night sky, and there it was. The call of the void.

The void was whispering, calling, howling to me, and I thought to myself, I am so ready to leap in (I didn’t). Perhaps nothing is real, the absolute truth inaccessible, but I write so that things feel real, become real.

Writing about today almost feels like a corruption of the experience, a glamorized, exploitative account of pain, and still I write, because by writing I relive, and by reliving I resurrect my emotions, create beauty from pain, reject my emptiness. I avoid the void, the void that is always calling.

These days.