intimate

I find myself in a constant haze with love. I frantically search for it as I maneuver through crowded subway stations, the shot of espresso cascading through my morning body. I yearn for intimacy with the air around me – my soles on the brick outside a home, hands against a table below the sidewalk, conversations in beds not my own. After a lonesome night drive through the city, my phone shows a Google search: places to fall in love. 

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I fingered a nickel in my pocket, but mistook it for a penny. Sacrificing something’s worth without glancing at it is an easy task, at least for me. I’ve always had trouble recognizing something’s value, thinking less of something greater, extracting the silver lining, leaving an unraveled edge. I wait for something to snag it, to loosen it more and more and more until there is cotton and thread and spandex strewn on the floor. The noble art of leaving things undone. Maybe, it is more accurate to say I have always had trouble valuing myself, attributing the right amount of love to my own being. I have never felt whole. I would rather be in pieces. I would rather you pick me up, collect my shreds, fuse me back together, make me beautiful – in your eyes. It’s hard to see yourself, an amalgamation of your life’s stages, an innocent childhood, a turbulent puberty, a coming of age story that’s rather unbecoming, and whisper, “I am whole as I am”. 

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It is love, because for too long, it was indifference, apathy even. But now it is love, in ways that are uncommon to the heart, like the back of pick-up trucks and inside of friends that should have looked away. It is a recollecting of love, if you will, an attempt to grasp at the frills that were there all along; my eyes were simply never open long enough for me to see them. Depression certainly takes that away from you, your quality of sight. There are no expectations there, simply a coming and going, an unfettered drive-thru of languor. I wondered if I subconsciously wanted to be constantly moving towards a funeral for my feelings: to wear black, to be dark.

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I feel like when I say I can’t get out of bed, you imagine my alarm goes off, I look at my phone and I just want five more minutes, just a little extra time – and in some ways that’s true – I do want five more minutes, just a little extra time, but not to sleep. All I want is just a little more time not to be myself – you never have to look at yourself in a dream. You’re just a character, never actually significant. I go back to the dreams, the fantasy and I become unfamiliar. It’s comforting to be inside of a different world that’s still somehow my own. Often times, when I do eventually get up, it’s not as bad as my mind makes it up to be, although I’m not really sure what it is – the world, the people, the sidewalk, me. Maybe it’s all of it or maybe it’s none of it. It’s hard to describe and maybe it doesn’t make sense, it’s hard to understand, even for me. But I think that’s the whole point too, that there isn’t a clear reason for why I feel the things that I feel. There’s no beginning or end, there’s no one thing that keeps me going, holding me back. I know though, that if I don’t get up, my subconscious voice doesn’t tell me to go away, doesn’t tell me that my presence doesn’t make a difference if it’s seen or not.

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I learned about the concept of supertasters in my psychology class, where certain people experience taste with far greater intensity. They have trouble eating carbonated or spicy foods – the extra flavor becomes too much. And so perhaps, this is the case for me, but just with emotions. Andrew Solomon says that depression is the flaw in love, that to be capable of love, we must in turn be creatures that despair over what is lost in us. I love too much and therefore I weep over too much lost. But, whereas before, my reaction would be a kind of retreat, a prayer for their dismissal, there now exists a willingness to cling to their power. I choose to bring myself to work, to coffeeshops, to places that crave my presence, that need me in order to function just as much as I need it. I contribute. I leave imprints as I go, smiling to the barista, asking how they are, telling someone they look good and meaning it. I see beauty as I go, whether it stays in the world or not. I take my emotions, feel more than we are maybe meant to, and figure out some way to deposit those extreme, tired feelings so that they bring life to someone, something else; I write. 

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Love is but a mouth, refusing to close.

I learn to unpocket myself from the seams that others bore, to tape myself back together, broken at the sides, an anthology of my travels.