What Do I Know?

“You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?”

Now, there’s a question you don’t get asked often. Even worse, there’s a catch: it’s not something you can answer in one or two words.

Pretty easy to formulate it, though. You find a girl and you realize she cries over pictures of cute puppies or the thousandth rewatch of Love and Other Drugs. You discover she cried for 4 days out of the 6 that you were away on field work. You look back to that one fight you had and you realize how petty it was. How she’s a child. You’re 4 months in and then you realize maybe this isn’t what you signed up for. You knew she was sad, but you didn’t know just how much.

Funny how some sentiments resonate through the stories we tell of other people. “Hey, you know,” you started telling me while in the middle of discussing a friend’s failing relationship. “He knew she was sad. I mean, he said he expected this.” You paused after this. I realize now you were trying to find the next line’s least damaging form. “He just didn’t expect her to be this sad. You know what I mean?”

I do know.

Still, I can’t help but think that maybe the only time we mean what we say is when we’re not using words of our own. We write love letters and somewhere down that letter, there’s always a quote or an homage from a book you like or, at least, read out of boredom. We get into fights and write long, winded messages on the technological apparatus afforded us and, still, we find ways to use the words of other people. We write prose and still we quote Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Parker. Maybe, when we write, we’re not meant to make legacies of our own the way they have, because we only speak in borrowed words.

So. You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?

The short answer is no. I wouldn’t know happiness otherwise. The long answer, however, is yes, because number one, to have a “long answer” is the only justification for an even longer explanation.

See, this girl, she cries watching Love and Other Drugs because, in the gritty reality, sick people are difficult to be with. This girl, she cries over puppies because they make her happy. Her temperament is melancholic. Her primary response is to cry. She would not know herself otherwise.

This girl, she’s emotional. She can’t make rational decisions when it’s her heart that carries all the weight and not her brains. For all her acclaimed smarts, she sure can be pretty stupid. You find a girl, you see something in her — only God knows what — and you decide that, hey, this doesn’t seem so bad. She doesn’t look that sad.

But five months down the road and you realize she is. You won’t allow her to put words in your mouth or put assumed regret somewhere in you, but she knows. You won’t say, but maybe at some point, it was what you were thinking.

See, this girl, she absorbs the sadness of other people. She breathes in the dark of other people and carries them as her own. It’s a black pit she keeps filling. She doesn’t tell. She doesn’t open up. Not as much as she used to, at least.

You give her power over you, this piece of shit we call love, and you know you’re only signing up for the sadness. So you do your best and ask her you ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes? in an attempt to find the reason you’re involved in this madness.

She wishes she could control it. You find out that she can’t. You put up with it. You think she’s a child. You think she’ll grow up. But you’ll grow white hair and acquire a limp and she still won’t get past the six-year-old that thrives inside her. You give her attention and you’re only watering the seed of a child who won’t grow.

And then, one day, you won’t do any of this. You won’t ask, you won’t give her the time of the day. You’re tired and you just want to sleep.

But you get a poem. You find it in the mail.

She says she’s sorry.

Always,

Claire

On Medium.com

Building. Rebuilding.

This was the 3rd journal entry in my Literature 3 (Literature, the Individual, and Society) class. We were discussing solitude and our professor asked us to include the following lines from Khalil Gibran's Mirrors of the Soul in our journal and write a reflection from it. This was mine:
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Flying over San Francisco, California, July 3, 2016

"Your inner soul, my friend, is surrounded with solitude and seclusion.
Were it not for this solitude and this seclusion you would not be you and
I would not be I. If it were not for that solitude and seclusion, I would, if
I heard your voice, think myself to be speaking; yet, if I saw your face, i
would imagine that I were looking into a mirror."
- Khalil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul

Khalil Gibran speaks of solitude as a friend and I believe this is the only proper approach to solitude. As something that seeks to help us rebuild ourselves, solitude is a friend that only wishes the best for us.

I can testify to this. When I was in a relationship, we spent as much time together as we could. Every time we went out, we always enclosed ourselves in seclusion. We were better alone together. When he left me, I found it difficult to put myself back together. It was my first break-up (meaning: one that I did not initiate) and I did not expect that it would hurt that much.

The journey to self-recovery started with earphones. After spending a whole year sharing one pair of earphones in the jeepney while his music played, there was a kind of healing felt in being able to listen to music in the jeep alone, to be able to place both earbuds in my ear and feel the weight of all that had transpired. This propelled me to learn to spend time with myself and to get to know this version of myself after the break-up. A stronger, better, and much kinder me.

I think that is what solitude does. When once I only learned to build homes in other people with scraps for foundation, I have now realized that my strongest foundation is within me. I learned to build my home in my hands, my heart, my brain.

I am my own home.

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RELATED WORK: "Details" on Medium | "Details" on Blogspot

Details

You remember sitting in a jeepney. Passing by a police station and a small branch of a big-name grocery store that sounds more like a rip-off of 7-Eleven. You come across a church. You forget to make the sign of the cross as the jeepney goes past it. You forget, or you just don't.

July 3, 2016
Seoul, South Korea

Those were the bigger details. Now your eyes travel to the smaller ones. The loud chatter of two high school girls at the far end of the jeepney, near the driver. Your right ear ignores it. Your eyes, however, cannot. So you stare. You run your eyes along the line of passengers across you. An elderly woman grips the handles of 2 large SM plastic bags as she snores, her head lolling around her neck. Someone from across stares at you. He's attractive, flirty. He keeps his eyes on you. Travels downwards. Until he sees the fingers locked with yours. He looks away and you swear you could almost see a small smile there, as if to say, "Of course not."

Ah. The fingers around yours. The ones owned by the person wearing the other earbud. You're connected by one set of earphones. You're too broke to buy a splitter. The music ranges from 50's folk rock to 60's German metal to 70's neo-psychedelia. It's only a 15-minute ride, but you do this all the time so you've heard everything.

He likes to surprise you with music. You love music. You're just not a musician like him, but he talks to you like one anyway. You mostly nod, ask questions. Mostly things you've read in your favorite book. Ever heard of an augmented fourth? The Devil's tritone? You wait for your turn to speak. To talk about yourself.

You zone out sometimes when he talks.  It's not unusual to be on a jeep with him when you're tired. You're always tired. He likes spending time with you. Or so he says. Whatever. He talks so much and you so little. But you love it anyway. Or so you say.

Whatever.

He's nice. There are days when he looks at you like you're the only person he can see. You feel stupid for looking for happiness anywhere else when all you need is right there in front of you, suspended in a single moment. Even though your intuition tells you it's all pretend. Because that's what you get for dating an actor.

Whatever. You sometimes confuse intuition with emotion. You're in love with him. That's what matters. Right?

You accidentally grip his hand too tight as you think all this. Whenever you're sad, you always clasp your own hands together and squeeze them, as if you could wring out the sadness from your bones. You can't, of course, but it stops you from crying. Just, this time, your fingers happened to be intertwined with his.

He asks you what's wrong and you smile at him and say, nothing. Like you always do. You lay your head down on his shoulder to assure him, soothe him. You're always soothing him.

You loved him once. You've convinced yourself you still do. You're desperate. It's not the loneliness. You're just a perfectionist. You wanted your first to be "the one".

Of course not.

You had a year together. You should've left earlier. Because now you're sitting alone in a jeepney heading home—45 to an hour—and you can faintly hear everybody hurts... sometimes... from the earphones of the person beside you.

You're remembering again. Afternoons spent in cramped jeepneys with his favorite songs playing in your left ear. Always the left ear. Maybe it meant something.

You cry in the jeepney. Nobody cares. All the strangers are tired and you're just another one of them. 

You like "Everybody Hurts". You liked every single one you listened to with him. Remembered titles in such great detail, artist and all, that you could name them in anywhere that you could hear them—during a neighbor's karaoke night or in a grocery store with your mom. Mundane, but effective.

These are the kind of details you notice. These are the details he never cared to know about you.

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Is this non-fiction? Maybe. Maybe it's fictitious. Maybe it's the fragments of a healing girl. Who knows.

[on medium.com]