drunkenly crying at the back of an uber because it's a canon event and drinking my salty tears for girl dinner
trying to understand the meaning of my life as i scroll through tiktok and dude, i'm just a girl
I watched a bug crawl in front of the microwave. For a moment, it stopped and we stared at each other as the anticipation grew for me to decide its fate. But instead, I stood there and waited until it scurried away and disappeared into the crack underneath because, for some reason, I was too tired to actually kill it. And in my exhaustion, I granted the bug its life.
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Not too long ago, I took a shower a quarter to midnight, hoping the pressure of the hot boiling water would heal my aching body. As I grabbed my towel and went to the bathroom, I felt my parents stare at me. From the corner of my eyes, I glanced at their confusion as they know my very passionate opinion on being vehemently against night showers. But they said nothing.
As the water trickled down my back, I looked down at my legs and noticed that they looked different. They were swollen, as if they were throbbing and pulsating in pain. They suddenly appeared as stocky and I wondered to myself if they always looked like this. The more I observed them, the more they winced in pain. I felt as though that at any moment, my legs were going to walk off, detaching itself from the rest of my body like plastic limbs of an action figure. My legs looked tired and they wanted to rid of me. I heard them sighing to themselves that they no longer wished to be a part of me as I exhausted them. They were tired of running.
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The night before, I sat in the back of an Uber, drunkenly sobbing. I remember attempting to quietly swallow the blubbers, but probably miserably failed since the Uber driver kept looking back in concern. As I watched us drive across the bridge and over the unforgiving and kind ocean, I wanted to cry harder and harder. I wanted my tears and desperation to create a rupture into the universe, crawl into it, lay inside, and sink into it forever.
I looked at the rearview window and watched my salty tears mix with my clompy black mascara until it was nothing but globs of thick black tears running down my cheeks. A tear streamed down to the corner of my lips but I had felt too worn out to wipe it away with my hands. I stuck out my tongue and licked it. Girl dinner, I thought to myself.
While I had felt foolish when thinking about the hours it took to put my face on together and sorry for myself for how the night had turned out, I couldn’t help but feel something shamefully thrilling. Underneath all the anguish, betrayal, frustration, and drunken thoughts (though I’m not sure which of these feelings I considered specifically as drunken and as only that), I found freakish joy in seeing my reflection, the mascara creating dark smudges down my face, reminding me of stills from Fleabag and other beloved series and films of mine.
While I cried, a voice deep inside of me whispered, Yes, this is a girl’s life. This is what a normal life is like and this is where a normal girl lives. I sniffled. It’s a canon event.
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I remembered watching movies where brokenhearted girls cried all the way home in the backseat of a taxi, daintly and quietly like a fawn. I thought of anecdotes of this exact experience that I read from Tumblr posts when I was a teenager, where strangers posted their deepest secrets. In some strange way, I felt protected by all of this. While feeling pathetic sitting in the Uber, the car smelling of rubber and pine tree air freshener, allowing the cold air from the AC to let my sweat and must stick to my skin and chewing on an Altoids mint before getting home, I relished in the fact that I was in a bubble of supposed normalcy.
There have been multiple nights like this since then. One night, I imagined that somewhere in the headquarters of Uber, a display of pictures of myself crying is taped on a wall with a sign above them that reads “BEWARE” and laughed to myself.
Then I got home and washed up, still laughing at how hilarious it would be. I laughed to myself as I peeled off my sweat drenched clothes and then laughed some more as I wiped off the sticky residue of makeup off my face until eventually, dread creeped in and it was no longer funny. A whiplash of tiredness and annoyance slapped me as I wondered how many nights and how many drivers had witnessed me in this state. Somewhere along the way, I found deep pleasure in this sadness. Because now, I wasn’t sad alone in the corner of my room anymore but under the lights at a party with my lipstick smudged and after a carefully planned performance. But maybe it doesn’t have to be like this, I thought to myself.
I thought about the times I danced the night away at a club or a party, how it first became a place for me to escape and to even celebrate myself. A defiant act to take up space. But somehow, it quickly morphed into something else.
I was talking to my close friend the other day, and we grieved because we had to grow up so young and so fast. It was as if we had strolled out of our mother’s womb fully adults. We were daughters and therefore, every moment of our life had us meticulously planning in maturity, being responsible for everyone around us. We could not afford to be stupid.
But no more, we thought. We wanted to be messy, even if it meant making mortifying and immature decisions.
In that maturity, I felt like I had lost something. That I have not lived. And each time I went home, even if I was a sad drunk angry crying pathetic mess, it still meant that I was inflating my life. I wanted to pump and pump and pump by any means possible until I can no longer hold it up and it collapses onto me. Crushing me.
I thought about all those years spent at home in my bed, watching others in front of me and began to believe that I had wasted so much time. That now I had to make everything count. My life is not full enough, I kept thinking. I grieved for a life I never had.
I wanted to be out of control, I wanted to be young and free and flighty and airy. I wanted to be pathetic, embarrassing, to be mindless—even if I was the consequence.
Having these “normal” experiences (Let’s be honest. Experiences deemed by Western society) no longer meant being there with others but hopelessly wanting to belong. To be seen. My eyes did not gaze at disco balls hanging above me and I didn’t feel the innocent urge to float into pretty LED lights dangling on the walls of an apartment in Bushwick, but feverishly looked into the eyes of others around me with hunger and desperation. I wanted to be seen because if they desired me, then it had to mean that I was real. That I was living a life.
I look back at these experiences and wonder. How each time, I had constantly felt like I was making up for time lost. That I was mentally collecting stories like trinkets so I can hold them up in my palms and say, “Look! I’m normal! I have a life! See! See!!”
While I cringe thinking about how I foolishly made out with someone with a name of a condiment wearing shutter glasses as they whispered strange stories about their ex, I realized I don’t regret any of it. No matter how ridiculous they all are. And trust me, they are.
But the fuel behind each and every one of these experiences had come from a place of deep longing and compensating for a life I wanted and never got. I wondered what would’ve happened if I lived these experiences with not hunger to prove to myself and others that I’m living, but hunger to actually live. A desire not to be seen, but a desire to explore. To discover what I do and do not like. To learn parts of myself, of others, and the world.
So when I walk away from something, somewhere, someone, I will not look back with a sense of euphoric superiority like I checked something off a list, but rather appreciation for the brief moment I got to share with the world in my short life.
And so, I will take my life into my hands and coo at it. I will pet it like it is something fragile and soft. You can see it but also cannot; noticeable to the eye but also invisible. It is lush as in dewey grass but brittle like a rocky chocolate bar and even sharp like the point of my mom’s needle from her sewing machine.
I caress it close to me and burrow it in my breasts. It will not weigh me down, it will not suffocate me, it is not gluttonous, it will not tell me to feed it more and more until it is too heavy.
It will look back at me, with eyes closed like a sleeping child and a soft smile on the corner of its lips.
As I hold it in my arms lovingly, I think about how my close friend and I often joke that every time we have one of those laughs (those laughs where you clench onto your stomach, you’re choking to death and on the brink of blacking out), we’re creating a rupture into the universe. That our laughter and joy is so profoundly strong-willed that it quite literally punctures a hole through it.
That is the hole that I want to live in forever.
sometimes when i read your words i feel like im floating on soft pink bubbles across a moody but cozy deep blue blendy sky 🌌, todays stack is one of those sometimes fr