We do everything we can.
I turned 20 while crying alone in my college dorm room. I turned 20 while silently sitting in my literature class. I turned 20 silently combing my hair in a communal bathroom. I grew up alone and silent. I grew up watching, feeling afraid, scraping my knee, and then keeping it a secret.
The modern fact is, you can grow but you can’t forget. The forest of sadness inside of me will remain burned. I can’t change that. The overwhelming collection of fruits filled with worms, crunchy leaves and charred dirt, and a stagnant rotting, will stay with me...in me…forever.
This doesn’t mean my life is over. The stench from my past is not impenetrable to every surface. I’ll just wear a heavier coat and a pungent vanilla perfume exclusively kept in brass bottles.
I’ve been trying to read more books. Political theory, books written by other women about being sad, poetry, cigarette stories, cannibalistic love, and tired history. I’ve been trying to fill myself up with things I’ve always been terrified to admire. I’ll wear low-cut tops and flirt with a boy, refuse to brush my hair, argue with everyone I hate, kiss everyone I love.
I’ve been trying to feel alive and I claim to understand everything while adding sugar to water and adding salt to my orange juice.
I’ll be who I am forever. Forever is never-ending, and I would love to have a house in the middle of the vortex of things, and a bathroom of my own. We do everything we can. We do everything we can.
-nadia mysteria…with all-consuming and confusing love x.
