Hello world.

This is about the jarring moment that happened to me last week and the thing that helped me feel normal again.

Or, just another Tuesday in young adulthood.

WHEN YOU SEE A GHOST

I was sitting alone reading between classes the other day when a familiar face popped up behind my book. I looked up to see one of my best friends from high school standing in front of me with the kind of sheepish grin that said,

It’s me, remember?

As if I could forget, anything, ever.

I had loved her with all of the fervor that teenage girls love their best friends, need their best friends. We used to stay up all night drinking illicit beverages from god knows who and god knows where until the world spun around us and nothing else mattered. Those days were brief and fleeting, but they were so quintessentially adolescent that I know I will never be able to scrub them out of me, even with all that came after.

AN OLD STORY

She moved away not long after one of those dizzy nights. I watched her run to catch her plane, not yet knowing that as that plane flew out of sight, so too did the life that I knew. She was the glue that held our group together. My friends each fell away like daisy petals in the wind that year. Did they love me, did they love me not? It was the beginning of an end.

I wouldn’t find out for a very long time that she knew things during that year when it all fell apart that I never told her. That she was, that they all were, talking behind my back across state lines. That from halfway across the country, she knew more about why they stopped speaking to me than I would find out for years when an apology letter showed up in my mailbox. Jealousy, insecurity, weakness–these were the reasons I got in that letter, the explanations for the knives I had to pull out of my own back as senior year fell around me like a claustrophobic dome. It was the year when trust became a thing I no longer instinctively had. How could it not have? I had become invisible to my own life, thinking all along that I was the problem. That I must have done something, said something. I would keep mistakingly thinking that for years, not yet knowing any better.

So when I saw her face, the one that I only ever loved and missed terribly, it sent my body spiraling. After we talked, catching up like nothing ever happened, I opened my book back up to find the words swirling like alphabet soup on the page. I must have tried to read the same sentence four or five times without the slightest clue as to what it said.

THE THING I DO TO BE PRESENT

I had just learned earlier that day that in order to fully process an emotion it must pass from the limbic to the prefrontal cortex, that this is what sets adults apart from children. This is what keeps us from throwing tantrums all day. I closed my book. I put music on. I closed my eyes and tried to hurry up the process, but my whole body felt strange. What we forget, the body remembers. I felt exposed, violated. Like someone just burst into my home without knocking.

I was sitting in class about an hour later, still processing, when my mind did something that helped tremendously. It oriented itself. I looked at the clock and said,

Okay. It’s 12:47 p.m. on October 3, 2023. You are sitting in Dr. X’s lecture on Victorian literature, one of the last classes of your degree. You are a senior here, at this university. You are twenty-one years old. You are about to graduate– from college, not high school. It’s 12:49 p.m.

And so on. I felt insane, but over and over again, I looked out at the palm fronds tapping on the window panes and recited these facts until my body understood that it was not in danger, that it was not in high school anymore, that it has been years and years. It’s like when people wake up in the hospital and they ask them Do you know where you are? Do you know what year it is? Do you know how you got here? It sounds dramatic, but it reset my mind. I could breathe again. I could feel the distance of time again.

I don’t talk to those people anymore for a reason. I’ve worked really hard to make new friends for a reason. I might still write about those years, but I don’t want to return to them. I might still love the memories and the people we knew each other to be, but we don’t know each other anymore. Not really. Not at all. I want to be here, twenty-one, about to graduate. About to move to New York. They are not a part of these things. These are my things. I fought a long time to hold them in own, bare hands.

WHEN ANGER IS LOVE

There was a time when I would have probably spent the rest of that day listening to sad songs and reliving those distant memories. I would have remembered everything deeply and longingly. I would have reached into the past and dug up that sadness and milked it for anything that it might still have to give me. When the words became alphabet soup on the page, I was prepared for that.

But it didn’t come.

Kind of like the other day after that mediocre date, I was surprised at how quickly I came back home to my life as it is today. Yes, I had to take a moment, but just a moment. Then I opened the door and walked back into my own life.

I read this quote the other day that said your anger is the part of you that knows you deserved to be treated better. It’s the part that defends and loves you.

I loved that because I realized that I wasn’t angry back then. I was sad, confused, and heartbroken, but never angry. And for the life of me, I don’t know why. When I think about it now, I feel like the older sister of the girl that I was, wanting to defend and protect her, knowing that there was never anything wrong with her. I didn’t seem to know that back then. That is what strikes anger now. It makes me want to scream. Not just for my younger self, but for the gutting experience of girlhood that most women have had.

Which I suppose should also make me smile, for they say that that anger, and the grief it stems from, is just love without a home. It’s a sign that you are able to feel the weight of things. Or, how art is born.

Love, m.

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