I have one bad habit…. when I need a break from ‘being social’, from sharing and listening and answering back…. when being around others starts to feel burdening and leaves me stuffy or down, I leave the places those I love can be found, and in the isolation… I spy those places every now and then. As if I was a ghost. I look at the people dearest to me and watch, become a passerby.
It’s not necessarily selfish or stalkish but I make it so, or it seems I do. If you’re a regular here you know how my brain will hold on first to what hurts, to the rose bush with thorns; I watch them speak to each other and share what they’re excited about; I look at them making plans between themselves, possibly building new friendships, enjoying their time in this crazy earth, living their lives without me in the picture. I become a crowd, a spectator.
Although my brain likes to convince me otherwise, this practice doesn’t always leave me feeling empty, or lonely, or sad. Rather I call it a bad habit because it’s one I can’t make sense of. My current life is at a state of wellbeing that I wanted it to be for months. I have a job I don’t hate and rather enjoy, even though it takes a tool on my energy (code for I Need To Sleep Earlier). I have been reading more and more. I feel loved and I love in return. I have a roof over my head and a warm bed waiting for me every day. The more I name and the more I look for them, I really can’t find reasons I’d want to become an outsider in my own life. Yet here I stand, talking myself out of my happiness.
Happy isn’t satisfied, whole. When your eyes are trained to spot the absence, when you can’t ignore what you lack even amidst the abundance of the world, it’s hard to calm down, to want be present, to not put on a show of how grateful you feel, how you really want to keep living — when you feel like rotten wood. Joy can’t forever be felt even if it’s everywhere. And I really dislike being this way…. how I always seem to go against the tide, swimming away from the current trying to embrace me, like the antagonist that can’t help but the stand at odds with the plot. My dad occasionally retorts in portuguese, ‘És sempre do contra!’, which I’m now finding out it has a word of it’s own in english: being a naysayer. That I enjoy contracting others and do it all the time — ironic, given I had the best teacher.
Mary Oliver in a poem named ‘October’ leaves me breathless with a single line,
What does the world mean to you if you can't trust it to go on shining when you're not there?
This is a concept that haunts me. Genuinely, I find myself wondering what the world would be like if I wasn’t here, not with hopes or intent that it becomes that way, but just… with curiosity. For the most part, in those instances where I’m gone from the world I usually stay in, I marvel at how insignificant my presence appears to be. The clock ticks 24 hours come what may, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west. My friends still smile and love. Nothing actually does stop in time and space, everything moves, everything sings. I’m realising now this probably isn’t the first time I’m writing about this sensation of impotence. I also think I’ve said it before, how in the past I believed being poor came down to not having much money, but now that I’m older and am starting from zero with my earnings, it’s much more about helplessness, the lack of options.
What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shinning when you’re not there? I hated playing hide-and-seek when I was younger. My class would spend their break on the game, but whenever I played along and had the chance to be the seeker, I’d tear up. It brought me a lot of fear, turning my back on my friends, counting with my eyes closed, my forehead resting on the bark of a tall cork tree, knowing they’d move from behind and I would be the one they’d run away from. It brought me anxiety, what if I do found someone? What if they see that I saw them? I don’t think I won a single game, anytime I’d get the faintest hint, 10 others would appear from some other side, I couldn’t run on time, couldn’t catch anyone. I sucked really bad at it, so much I gave up playing. It was fun for them, knowing that in me they had the certainty they would win.
Ada Limón shares in ‘The Endlessness’,
At first I was lonely, but then I was curious. The original fault was that I could not see the lines of things. My mother could. She could see shapes and lines and shadows, but all I could see was memory, what had been done to the object before it was placed on the coffee table or the nightstand. I could sense that it had a life underneath it. Because of this, I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About moving in the world? How could I touch anything or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making up stories; it was how the world was, or rather it is how the world is. I’ve only now become better at pretending that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch something it cannot always touch me back.
What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shinning when you’re not there? That sense that I couldn’t catch up has been with me for a while, morphed itself to fit countless of different occasions. I know I wasn’t good at that game, and it had genuine reasons, I don’t have, and probably shouldn’t try to look too far into everything as if someone pays me to read between the lines. It brings a lot of heartache, to think so much. I know I sucked because I wasn’t as fast as my peers when I ran, because they enjoyed the thrill and the tension of it all and I didn’t, because I’m easily scared, so I was probably far more afraid that I’d find them then they were of being found. It doesn’t mean much, I still feel as if I am that coward I was at 7. I gave up trying to be in their games and decided to play houses and dolls with the kids in the grade behind. I felt safer. To each their own happiness.
I texted a friend the other day, that I didn’t know what I had done to get their love, nor did I thought I deserved it much, but I was grateful they trusted me with it all the same. The most beloved article in this blog seems to be ‘i want to be your favourite,’, a testament to something that has lived and rotten within me for so long and which I wrote in a moment of utmost vulnerability. It’s also certainly one of the letters I dislike the most simply because of it’s sheer rawness and honesty. I feel naked and dirty in it. Like I grabbed a knife and cut myself open right in the middle. I feel naked when I’m honest, vulnerable, and although that’s exactly the point of it, it shouldn’t come with filth, should it? And…. sometimes it feels so meaningless. What does it matter, to open up, if the world still turns afterwards?
Do I wish my honesty meant more than what it does? Am I expecting a ‘Thank You For Sharing’ card? A standing ovation? Why does it hurt so much to see that everything remains unchanged, unfazed? How can we get over things? Is it because time forgives no one? What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shinning when you’re not there? Nothing will stop, and you hear people in funerals saying it a lot, ‘They wouldn’t want you to see you cry, they’d want you to move on’. And then it happens and when you really notice it happen it’s so strange. What did you expect? I’m not the sun, planets don’t orbit around my body, I’m not the centre of anyone’s existence but my own, and there’s a certain sadness to it that I can’t say out loud without bringing boundless shame. It’s the same sentiment I conveyed through that letter. A selfishness in wanting to be loved without boundaries and lines and to love so hard it burns, all kinds of burning. In wanting to be missed. It’s wicked, these feel forbidden, so egotistical.
I watched ‘Little Women’ the other day, Greta’s version, and so many lines struck to my core. Especially Jo’s, even if I see myself as an Amy girl (and apologist). And there’s this piece of dialogue that really had me thinking.
I care more to be loved. That is not the same as loving. Sometimes I think it won’t matter how many times people tell me they love me. I go crazy with how unwanted I feel and it’s no one’s fault that I am like this. I’ve outgrown the age of expecting others to heal this from me but I still hope. That’s both what kills and what keeps one alive, hope. I spent a Saturday afternoon by myself and had a comfortable, enjoyable time, sincerely I really did, I did. It was almost sacred because it feels so rare when it isn’t. It happens often but my head and my body and my soul are in different places when it occurs. It’s rare for them to be all in one, all inside me. I don’t think I deserve to be loved in solitude. I’ve never realised it, how unimportant I saw my love for myself, a love that isn’t witnessed, watched by others… validated by someone that isn’t myself. Isn’t it ironic that I’m telling you this and making you a watcher? It’s… I think it’s pointless to keep it all up inside, to not share the pain that lives within. It is pain that connects us. So I write it out. And it heals me in ways nothing else can.
And I don’t even know if it makes sense to anyone. If this feeling echoes. Is it what they say, about not being able to love other until you love yourself? Because I’ve never really believed in that saying. Yet I do think it becomes (not is, not is necessarily) meaningless if I don’t believe the words, if I can’t give them value on my own, if I can’t trust that when I turn around those I love won’t run away and hide, if I can’t be thankful that the world will go on shinning when I’m not there and they’ll find another happiness that isn’t me. I lack the trust to love the world and believe that it does love me back. I wonder if it isn’t disrespectful too, to not accept their words as enough to satisfy this hunger. I think all along I’ve been eating sugar when my body needed salt.
It feels as if I’m ungrateful. A dog that bites the hand that feeds him. I don’t want to play pretend, I don’t wish to lie, so I stay quiet and tell myself it won’t hurt others if I say nothing — you can’t lie if you don’t speak — if I disappear for a while to collect my pieces and pierce them together again. I think, I will always disappoint you in one way or another, the same way this world disappoints me time and time again, or that you too have, somehow someway, unexpectedly so, and I can’t ever tell whose fault it is. You are just you and I am just me. And the loving subsides the disappointment. It has to.
I read once, ‘this life only wants to love you’ and found it ridiculous. I read in another instance ,' ‘it will hurt you as long as you love it’, and couldn’t deny it. I try to twist it and make it so it fits all this. It only keeps hurting because love exists, threading through all things, patching them up and keeping them together, whole in their own special way. What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shinning when you’re not there? Love isn’t the ever present existence of pain and disappointment, of sorrow. Or so I don’t want it to be. I want to believe love is the comfort you find through it, in spite of and because of. There’s love in how those dear to you won’t be suffering forever. And there’s love in how they might tell you otherwise.
It’s funny, I think a lot of us see ourselves as rotten work and lost causes and original faults, all kinds of tragedies. There’s a poetry in being sad and hopeless, even the traditional plot progression expects its hero to feel despair and loss. George Bataille wrote, “No greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound”, there are times where I feel it buzzing, a life of its own, that edge of a cliff calling my name, wanting to get hurt for the sake of tasting control. Saying I knew it. It’s all the same. I deserve this. I’m worthless. But here, I have the choice not to. To prove the contrary. What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shinning when you’re not there, and what does the world mean to you if it can only make sense when you’re hurting?
I want to be saved but I’d die before letting anyone see me in trouble, or so I tell myself that. We’re not always what we believe we are, or so life has been teaching me. I don’t have to be a passerby, a cat chasing my own tail, a hurt person that only hurts others. I know I want my presence in this world to have an impact — it already has. Ever so slowly, ever so surely, comes the urge to hold on to everything for not the fear but the certainty that it slips away from my fingers. It comes so violently all you can do is claw at it, grip it by the teeth. The feeling that a friendship will be over even as it breathes in your hands. That this happiness, any happiness, won’t last. That someone will like me only until they figure out they hate me. How can I ever quell this thing within that won’t stop wanting? Call it insecurity, trauma, sadness, the hole is there, the leak. It doesn’t necessarily need to be something vacant and without a body, it's the constant drop, the faucet that won't close right, the dinky bird with its beak that drinks and drinks and drinks.
Can I dare to hope again? Tomorrow is a new chance. Life has yet to be written. Today I had a nightmare that brought me to tears. I’ll get hurt somehow and the pain might pile up and build a tower, not a wall this time. From up above you can see the distance from where you stood and where you sit, how much you’ve crawled your way out of a hell you thought would never end. I can't control much, these hands of mine have never been known for being big, much less strong. I can control how I treat myself, the extra blanket on the bed, the candy in my pocket, spending some time on my own with some chocolate milk and blankets just to see how it won’t kill me, how it can be fun too. Time spent being lonely is time spent in this world. This is enough proof. There is power in sparing yourself from pain, just as there is some pseudo sense of it when you do feel hurt. I seem to forget that way too often.
I wrote a quote from Tennessee Williams and keep it inside my phone case. “Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.” There is so much comfort in knowing life goes on, yet here I am thinking of what gets broken, forgotten, left behind. I’m talking myself out of my happiness, as I typically do. What is gone is gone and it might never truly leave you. I have the tendency of seeing too much, of picturing a person as more than what they really are, which is a bundle of what one loves and fears and wishes. Perhaps it’ll be selfish to say it, I wish the world would get sad if, when I’m really gone one day. How would you like to be remembered? I keep treating myself with a similar kindness I lay on others even when I don’t think it’s deserved. I keep a small notebook, a ‘Compliment Journal’. November has started and my mom got me one of those long sausage-ish jackets. It's a little dirty but I still wear it. I guess, that's how you have to be to yourself sometimes too. It's fragile but it won't break with one shove. It's tearing at the seems but it can still warm. There is plenty of life behind, underneath us. Many wounds, self inflicted and others, that may chip away who we are. It’s through the cracks that light gets in.
Thank you for reading delicate this week. I hope the winter doesn’t kill you.
I urge you to share, talk, speak up about Gaza and the current genocide that is happening, led by Israel. These days I keep myself informed still, share what I can, and it might not seem like much, but please, lend an ear to the voices that are trying to be silenced.
If you’d like to, Rohini shared a couple of works from Palestinian poets in her own newsletter. ‘Mimesis’ by Fady Joudah was particularly heartbreaking. Here’s the full poem.
My daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?
DELICACIES OF THE WEEK
You may hate it or you may love it, but I hop on to TikTok, and I’ve found a lovely artist, clownlifeizzi. She does these comics often with the most random topics, and they touch my core each time. My favorite is called ‘The sensitive ones’, but I go through her drawings often and keep some bookmarked. They’ve inspired me to start some. It’s oddly therapeutic.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserAfter watching an album reaction of Reneé Rap’s debut album, “Snow Angel”, I took a dive into it and I am so glad I did. It has those angsty older teen, early adult rage at the world and what you don’t understand, paired with an honesty and humor that, I don’t know Reneé, but I can guess that they might be trademarks of her personality. It reminded me of Olivia Rodrigo, though personally Alexander 23 and Jon Bellion in the production give Rap’s songs a sadder touch.
To me the standouts are definitely ‘The Wedding Song’, ‘Poison Poison’, ‘I Hate Boston’, ‘Snow Angel’, ‘I Talk Too Much’ and ‘23’.
For a change, I’ll tell you a couple of stuff I’m really excited about. I hope you know happiness also exists in the waiting for something. Red Velvet and Vaundy have new albums coming out, on the 14th and the 15th respectively — plus a repackage of ‘Snow Angel’, on the 17th . I’m trying to book a cinema session with my friends to watch the new Hunger Games — which I also should read soon, my brother got me the book. This is the first year where I’m buying Christmas presents, and its terrifying, I don’t want to spend money, but I want to give gifts, and both can’t coexist easily. I take candy with me everyday now.
SONGS OF THE WEEK: snow angel by reneé rap , small death ft jungwoo by menaingful stone and underwater by chuu
delicate’s spotify playlist! & delicate’s tumblr