New Episode
Afternoons spent staring at screens, and the evenings spent looking at the ceiling letting the time pass by as all these years did. At age 3, hoping to make it out alive and at age 23 barely alive. The childhood bed which was once too big and filled up with toys so as not to feel lonely- is now just right, the toys still sit on either side- the loneliness still looms over your head as your only friend since childhood.
When at 13, frantically writing away and wanting to run, you thought this is it- I will write and then one day I will not be here. I will be saved, not by anyone else but myself. It felt so good then. Dreaming up landscapes, and lives and friends that you’d have- how everything will look up soon enough so you don’t have to do anything to yourself- you can stick around a little more- it gets better, I promise it does.
At 18, lost in the city you know all the roads to you decide it is now or never, this is the only time when you could run. Far away from everything and everyone. Because you did not feel like you owned anything in this town- perhaps the loneliness it caused and then nothing else.
Laughs fade, tears dry up and you are no longer thinking of people and things in your faraway city. Sometimes you see them, see what they are doing and you long for the love you always begged for and then you close away and you focus on something else.
I think, growing up was getting out of your room and doing something about how it felt. Something that the childhood bedroom and its thousand posters about getting better would not allow. When you come back to the bedroom, you are 14, 18 and 21 and everything bad that has happened to you sits right next to you as you dust your painting kit and mix colours to forget how it feels to be this lonely. Each time promising that you won’t come back here- you won’t allow it to get under your skin and crawl up to your throat and choke you. You don’t have to sob in your bed, panic in the washroom, or run from what it means to be as old as you feel. You don’t have to be sorry then, for wanting more than just the coldness in the air, the shiver down your spine.
And the streets and the people, they all live on in bliss, you have erased most connections by your own hand and reaching out in desperation feels so terrible that you decide that you’d write again. But you are grown and you left writing in English Class in 10th Grade when the teacher asked if everything was okay. It wasn’t. Years later, even when everything seems fine- you come sit in your childhood bedroom for a week and you are back on the ledge, hoping to jump this time.