my body is grounded on the train, my legs crossed. my heart beats, each resounding thump coming a fixed time after the last.

I am okay. at the same time, I am not okay.

all my life, I’ve been independent. I never relied on anybody for happiness—never did I rely on anything other than myself, my passions, my friends, and my family for happiness.

I didn’t need anybody to tell me that I’m a special person. I didn’t need teachers to praise my work in school. I didn’t need a girl to “show me the world”.

could it just be first love? in high school, the times I believed I was in love turned out to be nothing more than delusional, whimsical times marked by conversations with as much depth as the shallowest bodies of water.

I didn’t talk about my vulnerabilities, least of all the darkest parts of myself. being able to share them with someone felt absolutely liberating. I realize now that in doing so, I moved away from my independence, removing and reshackling a once-leashed piece of my soul to another person.

I didn’t realize that in doing so, I had crossed a line from which I could never step back.

codependency is dangerous. it strips you of yourself even when you think you’re whole.

I am whole now. logic and intuition dictate it—mandate it, even.

no.

I am not whole. emotion and loneliness dictate it.

it’s all just one big clash. what I would just give to start with a clean slate, to be lobotomized and stripped of all I know.

she still haunt my thoughts.

what’s that line? “pain demands to be felt.”

how much does pain demand to be felt before pain abolishes its cruelty?

I’m just not the same person. I can go out with as many of my lovely friends as I can. I can play games on the PlayStation 4 for hours on end. I can study computer science and math with zealous passion.

I can do all that, and still I’d feel this hollow hole inside of me.

taking malevolent advantage of my shattered independence, this hole bore itself into me. I’ve been reduced from a rational, autonomous being to a confused, fragmented harddisk. which fragments of me are missing? I still go about my daily routine without as much as a drop of variance, but I feel those missing fragments calling out to me every day. are they even there, or are they just illusions conjured by the arcane thing that they call heartbreak?

am I whole, or am I a hole?

I’ve accepted that this probably will not go away, not until the day I repeat the cycle of codependency, when I choose to love someone new. next time, however, I’ll know more. perhaps I’ll never reach the stage at which I can claim myself “ready”—how can we ever be ready for something that’s so malleable, so conducive to sudden fluctuations in feeling and practicality? perhaps never, but I will know more.

love.

why do we love? it’s a social construct, yes, but as Anne Hathaway suggests in Interstellar, love somehow transcends notions of space and time. it’s not defined by anything we can empirically detect.

that’s a scary thing.

is this my punishment?

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