Say It.
I
Lately:
You are tired.
You know this because you sat down to write to your loved ones, but all you can think about is a choice between sleep-food-road. You are not the pink Duracell bunny, after all. This is fine by you, because you’re not quite feeling the colour pink. It has long been weaponised against your skin-past-present. If you had more energy – if you were the pink Duracell bunny – you'd expand on this. You ignore the equivocation of pinkness in this instance.
The word depression crawls around the moist ridges of your lips.
You know this because you taste its sticky salt after sleeping for 9+ hours, or running 7+ miles: both signs of a body in flight. You fight the urge to bite-swallow-purge the word. Online, you are half a selfie of your better angle and a tag in a timezone 6 to 9 hours away from where you are now. Double-taps in the timeline and a melanin prayer in the DMs lets you know you’re still here. You know you’re overthinking it – and you know you’re also not.
“It’s like you died,” he says.
You both laugh. There it is. Your laughs don’t sound the same. Months of excavating body-mind-dreams have made a shell of you, shiny and new. “How long are you here for?” flirts with “Let’s hang.” But with each new moon, you are evaporating. Why go outside now, just to mask emotions, when you can entomb yourself in a L’Oréal mask? Something inside you quivers, as if to dislodge a seed.
Are you still here? You push-pull-pinch yourself. Of course you are. You are. You are thousands of miles-meals-goodnights away from who you thought you’d be by now.
Now what?
II
“Say it with your chest,” says the meme with the dancing cat.
Say what?
Say it with your chest: “I’m saying it with my chest.”
Didn’t I just –
– Say it.
Fine.
I am depleted.
I know this because I sat down to write to you, but all I can think about is a choice between sleep-food-road and when our bodies last touched. I am not the pink Duracell bunny after all. This is fine by me because sometimes I kinda hate the colour pink. Too long has it been weaponised against the brown of my nipples, the blush my lips. If I had more energy – if I was the pink Duracell bunny – I’d expand on this. Let’s ignore the fact that I’m fucking around with two meanings of the colour pink. Let’s also ignore the fact that a word like equivocation puts distance between me and –
Anyway the word is depression and it is crawling around the moist ridges of my lips.
I know this because I taste its sticky salt after sleeping for 9+ hours, or running 7+ miles: both signs of my body in flight. I am fighting the urge to bite-swallow-purge probabilities of myself I do not like. Online, I’m half a selfie of my bloody best angle and a tag in a timezone anywhere but here. Double-taps in the timeline and a melanin prayer in the DMs lets me know I’m still here—in the fucking DMs. I know I’m overthinking it and I know I’m also not.
“It’s like you died,” he says of my absence.
We laugh. There it is. Gas on. Our laughs don’t sound the same. Months of excavating body-mind- dreams have hollowed me out. “How long are you here for?” plays catch-up with “You up?” With each new moon I am evaporating, just not fast enough. Why go outside now, only to mask emotions, when I can watch our death unfold behind this L’Oréal mask? The clay one. I use the word "death" lightly, of course.
Anyway, a mantra: “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut.
Okay Kurt. I push-pull-pinch myself. Am I still here? Of course I am. I am. I am exactly 12 832 miles-meals-goodnight-I-love-yous away from who I thought I’d be by now. And you know what?
Everything is beautiful but some things do hurt – until they don’t.
enD
(2020) Published: Knus Magazine (10.02.2021)