You're doing Fine

How are you doing? Do you ever wonder why it seems so easy to breathe in books and movies while all you can do is exhale smoke through your fingertips? On too many nights you have gone to sleep with red eyes and a blocked nose which often come back to greet you in your solitude.

You’re doing fine. Every day you cruise through lives of so many different people, who laugh louder than you, who cry more wildly than you do and whose screams are actually heard by other people. Do you ever wonder what their lives must be like? Are you among those whose tired eyes look for shore while at sea, or are you just there to enjoy the sail? The world keeps tricking you. It plays with your innocence, for every time you smell the Palm sands lit by the sun, it’s nothing but cheap perfume mimicking what people seem to have lost in their lives. It is suffocating, but somehow it ends up relieving you. Funny how you claim that hope is nothing more than a twisted man-made construct, but end up hoping for things even without you realising it. Sometimes you hope for change and sometimes for hope for things to remain exactly the way they are.

You’re doing good. You share songs with strangers on hazy evenings and lay your head on their laps until you sink. You wrap yourself in a stranger’s arms and kiss them, but they don’t even know how to say your name right. You write to them things they can not even comprehend, but you write anyway, hoping against hope that they will be the one to finally make sense of it all. You tell your stories, but they merely remain stories. You’ve told versions of it so many times, to so many strangers that you’ve actually forgotten how it made you feel one time, many moons back. You are happy with the stranger because with them you don’t have to think, and sometimes you don’t even have to feel, but your entire being is occupied with their presence. Do you realise you don’t even want them at all? At best, you want the childish and almost cruel, dreamy-eyed version of ‘you’ that they make you feel like.

You’re doing great. Perhaps one day you’ll wake up next to love, you’ll breathe directly into the wild and all your tear-stained clothes will have been washed. Your stranger will then have a face, a name, a story and they’ll hold your head up when you feel like sinking. Love will find you and even if it does not save you, it’ll help you to look at your reflection again and not hate it. It’ll enable you to feel your own stories once again and one night, when the moon is unusually bright, you’ll realise erasing me from you was a necessity.