by www.letters-to-nobody.tumblr.com
You’re sixteen and seventeen or nineteen and twenty and you’re starting to realise that growing up feels like slowly pulling out a thorn from your flesh. You’re sitting alone and watching the sun come up and everyone you know is still sleeping, or trying to, or pretending to. You learn to walk away from phrases like Let’s give this another shot. You simultaneously become more sensitive and more detached. You hand out parts of yourself like souvenirs, until you have trouble grasping onto what’s left. But — but — there are still the few people who are willing to peel back their skin for you, show you what’s underneath all the layers. And yet you learn to stomach your feelings and keep your memories to yourself, because when you tell a memory too many times, it either becomes more than it is, less than it is, or something different altogether, blurred by time and tampered by loneliness. And sometimes, you put his name into Google Images and stare at all the strange faces of people with the same name as him, scrolling page after page until your eyes blur and you momentarily forget the angle of his cheekbones and the lines on his palms that were once midnight roads to places you thought you could call home. At night, you lie awake trying to curl your palm around old feelings and old memories. But in darkness they are slippery, falling through the gaps between your fingers and joining the list of things that were once tangible, and now only wisps of feeling, absences in the shape of your empty hands. It gets harder to breathe. In your mind, you move from the bed to the couch to the floor to another country, another continent, another life altogether. You constantly try to reconstruct yourself, renew your body and mind into something someone might be able to love. Into something you will learn not to destroy. But when the curtains are closed and the dust settles into your hair, you learn that growing up cannot be transformed into anything else. That at 3.a.m. you cannot excavate yourself. You can only wait. And feel. Close your eyes. You are sitting at a piano in a bombed-out warehouse in a country where nobody listens to music anymore. Forget how your mother once tucked your hair behind your ears. Forget the words your father sliced through your skin. Forget the boys who liked you better with your shirt off. Forget the teachers who you loved but disappointed. Forget the person you used to be. Forget the person you want to be. Listen to music in languages you can’t understand. Watch TV on mute. Change your handwriting. Fold yourself in half, in half again, and once more. Slip yourself into a stranger’s pocket and let them carry you to places without names, to people without faces.
So cup your hands around the absence, and learn to grow into it. Learn to fall into it. Mould your body like clay. Light candles. Light lanterns. Light matches and campfires. Follow the light. Swallow the light. Impregnate yourself with all the light until the darkness folds in on itself and something new is born. Growing up is learning to be comfortable with the softness of your tummy, the body that you live in. Tattoo yourself with feeling. Touch the torsoes of trees. Burn incense. Mourn for the people you miss, the people you loved, the child you once were. Choke with feeling. Shake with feeling. Now stop. Slow down, breathe. Pull out your insides and thread your DNA into something that the world cannot control. Build yourself up from the ground. Knead the dough of your mind. Turn yourself into a feeling. Turn yourself into something you cannot touch.
Drag yourself outside, stand at the intersection and hand out the best parts of yourself, until you are left with something small enough to skip like a pebble over the lake, squinting into the sunset and watching as it stops and sinks slowly, softly, uncertainly to the bottom.
Now get up and walk away. Don’t you dare look back.
