I Am Not God, But I Am Something Similar

I am not a Friday night or a Sunday morning. I’m a Tuesday afternoon at best, already wishing for the week to end. I am not a graceful person, not like a Saturday sunrise during the summer or dusk on an autumn Thursday evening. I hold onto things, to moments, and to people for too long. I grip them a little too hard, unwilling to let go. I mourn a moment before it even passes, unable to appreciate the present for what it is. I don’t speak to anyone during the weekdays, and I spend a little too much time thinking about a meal after I’ve eaten. There’s a world in which I don’t think I’m a terrible person, where I reserve a little bit of the love I have for others for myself. It is the end of August; the guilt of wishing for summer to end too soon makes me sick to my stomach. I am September, the time of change. You either love me or you hate me.

Transitional periods always have a way of making me stumble, even when I know they’re coming, even when nothing significant in my life is changing. Suffering feels sacred if you do it right. I don’t believe in God, but sometimes I press my ear against the wall and close my eyes, and I think I can hear him. He sounds like the ripping of duct tape, packing away parts of a place I used to call home. I have not lived there in a year, but there was a point where the four walls of my old bedroom were the only witnesses to the way heartbreak tore my life apart. A year has passed, and those walls now belong to someone else. I wonder how many strangers have called the same place home. 

And suddenly, I feel life in my hands. It fell out of the sky on a random Wednesday morning, and instinctively, I reached out and grabbed it before it could shatter on the sidewalk. It is so much harder to face when I can feel it sitting in my palms, the weight of it loaded with laughter and tears and memories I try so hard to forget. It’s here, and I can’t avoid it. Before, I tried to make sense of my existence, reducing my experiences to metaphors so I could wrap my head around the years as they flew by. I tried to construct a meaningful narrative out of my recollections, measuring my life with a ruler, like counting spare change from my back pocket. No, silly girl, that is not the way to live. It’s here now, beating, pulsing, breathing in your hands. What are you going to do with it? What will you do?

I’ve never known what to do with the residual pieces of my life after things change. How do I reconcile with the regret of not doing enough? My best friends live in different cities and different continents, but I still feel them like a phantom limb. Every time life changes, every time someone leaves, every time I part away from a place I call home, part away from a person I called home, the world ends, over and over and over again. Why does it feel so violent? It’s a little frightening how much I feel, how I remember so much and so little at the same time. I am no longer a child, but I don’t feel like an adult. I’m some miscalculated experiment, a mixture of juvenile helplessness and the cynicism of someone who’s experienced the world a little too deeply. My subconscious seems to understand but my feet don’t seem to know where to go. I am stumbling, still. Tripping down the stairs, each step is a lesson I still have not learned. 

Here is how I spend my days now: in a constant state of “I don’t know”. Struggling to find beauty in the empty space between memories and what is yet to come, struggling to find comfort in this loneliness that seems almost contagious, spreading to people around me. This shared isolation may just be the most intimate form of connection. I’m not God, but I am something similar. The feeling of eternal anguish, perhaps. Trying to grasp something intangible in your hands, a fleeting moment of hope. I am a hangover on a Sunday, trying to piece together where I went wrong the previous night. I am the feeling of falling out of love, realizing that I don’t remember their apartment number or the password to their phone anymore. It’s funny how a new beginning can feel so nauseating. I am the cracked spine of a book; I open up to the same pages every time. I cannot close a chapter until I’ve squeezed every last drop of grief and nostalgia from it. I realize now if that is what constitutes finishing a book, I am illiterate. 

I am a dead man walking, an atheist praying to whoever will listen to them. I am September, the muggy summer air turning brisk and chilly. The leaves begin to change color and there is a feeling in the air. I can not tell if it is a promise of dreams coming true or the apprehension of another lonely fall. I am holding onto August, sinking my teeth deep into its flesh. Forgive me, I do not know how to let go. I have the blood of past Augusts and Julys and Junes stained under my fingernails. I am not a God, but my goodness, I wish I was.