I’m envious of people who are out there living. I’m tired of work and books and conversations only on social media. Tonight I allow myself to feel pain. The same pain that drives Sylvia Plath to write her journals, the same pain that makes her cry herself at night grieving over the lives she couldn’t live. Because she is her and her childhood, because she is just one person with just one life, because she can’t eat every fig on the tree as they plop onto the ground one by one. Tonight I allow myself to be unbearably, painfully, bored with my life.
The girl I laughed at for whining about how there’s no wifi in a little French village where she went on vacation is walking around Europe, buying OK Computer at a record store in Germany or wherever she is now. My friend who I thought will walk at the same pace as me just went back from the UK, I don’t know how her mind works nowadays and I’m sure she is now a much more complex, deep, and empathic woman than I can be today. Tonight I allow myself to be shallow and insecure.
The year slipped as my hands are occupied with nurturing and growing my body to be bigger than the grief I carry. I cried over a loved one’s wedding thinking about how lonely mine would be without my father. I cried over the things I didn’t even try to do. I cried over time that I wasted sleeping because I was too tired to get up and live. I cried over the sheer knowledge and solid conviction that I will repeat another week doing the exact same thing, starting tomorrow.
I always ease myself with the things I managed to do, went to therapy, build bridges with the people I cherish, and burn the ones that connect me to the people who bring the worst questions I could ever ask myself (Did I not make myself clear? Am I not worthy to be heard?). I confronted someone who made sexual harassment jokes in college. I say thank you to the people who still see me as a person when half of the campus sees me as the crazy ex. I got a tiny tiny story published and brought to New York. I won awards for my work. And yet I feel like I’ve never lived any less than this. This year I am the four walls of my room. Life can’t possibly be any less than that.
Tonight I’m mourning that I’m not solo traveling somewhere I’ve always wanted to be. Tonight I’m mourning the things I can only experience secondhand through moving frames, music, and whatever the algorithm serves me. I’m mourning that I’m not married with kids, living my best life as a bookstore owner, or visiting art galleries for the first time in a foreign country. The internet has beaten the very last drop of meaning from the word wanderlust and yet here I am drowning in it like it’s a salt tub people purposefully float in it to feel nothing. But I didn’t step in voluntarily.
But this frustrating, suffocating feeling from being stuck in a blessing too because, for the first time in I don’t know how long, I have no escape other than a blank page. If this nauseating feeling is what it takes to bring me here, then I am grateful for it. If this is what I should go through to see a blank page as an escape — a fire escape, Ocean Vuong said — then I am more than willing. So tonight I let myself escape. Not to a film festival, not to a foreign art gallery, not to France, not to a festival stage, but to a blank page.
