Since the age of twenty-one, there has been a permanent resident in my chest. She is vague, painfully consistent, and nearly impossible to describe. I often wake to find her eagerly awaiting my first thoughts; meticulously devouring the mornings, and brining me to my feet to gaze out the window and wonder how, exactly, did we all get here and what in God’s name, am I doing?
The logical piece of me knows that she is a common resident in most any human, except for maybe Buddha, or the Dalai Lama, but maybe even they suffered from the same kind of confusion-induced resident. That is what she is- she is my confusion, or the result of it, not quite sure which (only proving my point). She wreaks havoc on my decision-making and seems to only let me rest as long as I am temporarily occupied (by relatively meaningless tasks). And I am convinced that she grows stronger in my brief hiatuses of debatably meaningful things- at work, at the gym, at the movies, at the bar, on a date. She grows stronger so that come the next morning she raises my heart rate and brings on a mild panic. This panic is not overwhelming, but it is always there; it is rooted in the fact that I am young, don’t know what I am doing, nearly convinced that I don’t know how to live my life (inevitably true, I presume), and terrified that I may never get out of here. Only problem is I don’t really know where here is. Yet.
Figuring out where I am is step one. Simple, and yet at the age of twenty-four, three years into this silly dance, I am not noticeably closer to finding the answer. In a physical sense, I am here in my apartment, or here in Seattle, but what I want to know is where am I in that existential sense. Where are all the pieces of me? What exactly is the sum of all my parts? Why do streaks of sunlight through my window on a July afternoon cause a tinge of heartache? Why does time feel all at once fleeting and stagnant? Is that even possible?
I want so badly to make the right choices and be able to calculate the results of each output so as to cultivate the least amount of heartache as is humanly possible. And maximize the amount of smiling and laughing. This too, is not solely related to my own wants. In fact, these wishes are what will most likely bond me to all my fellow sufferers, rejoicers, refugees, mothers, fathers, homeless, etc. This is what makes me human. This is why I bleed the same. And yet, the slightly different shade of all of this is what also, inevitably, makes me, me. This and the intricately confusing presence of my mysterious chest-resident; she won’t leave. I am going to have to learn to deal with her. I am beginning to suspect that I need her desperately, like maybe she knows best. But the only way to find an understanding of her is by climbing up some impossibly steep psychological mountain, so that when I reach the top I can jump. And fall. Insanely fast, and with the greatest purpose, only to crash, explode all over the earthy floor, and discover that somewhere in the peak of the chaos is the calm of the fall- the feeling of flying. And this mountain is huge. Like massive. And I don’t even know where to begin looking. But this woman in my chest, for three straight years has told me every morning that it is out there. I am just not looking hard enough or high enough. And here I was thinking that the sky was the limit.
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