We Are One of Each Other's Habits

Where do you hold your emotions? Where does your joy live? Your sadness, your anger, your excitement, your grief? Do they permeate throughout your body? Or do they manifest in one place, a compact ball of feelings in your chest beating at the wall of your lungs, desperate to escape? Where do you feel? Where do you feel the most? 

Most of the time, joy and excitement make a home for themselves in my legs. When they wake, I am itching to be on my feet, dancing to music by myself in my bedroom. I don’t care who sees! I feel like I can run for miles on end, power pulsing through my thighs, my calves, my ankles. How blessed I am for these limbs that can carry me through every single day. How much joy I have! I can feel it so deeply, in my legs, they pound with excitement. Sometimes I can feel this exhilaration take its course through my whole body, running down my arms, reaching the very tips of my fingers. It trails up the back of my neck, spreading all around my scalp. I am happy, finally. Joy, it reigns all around.

Anger and grief, sometimes they exist together but are not always compatible. This is when I feel them the most -- typically in my hands. Grief slowly arises when I laugh at a joke he used to make and smile at something that reminds me of him. I notice my heart is pounding and grief is walking along the lines on my palm, my fingers have curled so tightly into fists that I am now bleeding. Time will continue to pass but my hands will always know. Anger will demand authority because it does not like the discomfort grief brings about. My hands begin to shake, like anger is trying to rid myself of this sadness. No, don’t be sorry that it happened. Be angry it happened to you. This fury is easier to handle than misery. It’s wringing out the grief like drops of water from a towel. Anger continues to tighten its grip, twisting harder and harder. It’s no help, I am just suffocating from it all. Stop fighting, I try to say. My hands clamp over my mouth; I can’t speak.

Loneliness is a parasite in my chest, burrowing into the spaces between my ribs. It needs to make itself known. It crawls around the outside of my lungs, clinging to them with every breath I take. It digs its claws into my heart, every beat I take it sinks deeper into my flesh. That’s the thing with loneliness; it cannot be ignored. It won’t let me. No, it’s not painful, though. Loneliness doesn’t seek to hurt me. It just wants to be seen, to be felt. Every time I feel like I’ve escaped its hold on me, it knocks on the bones of my ribcage, reminding me, not quite. The sound echoes throughout the cavity of my chest, hollow. Someone, please. Make this knocking stop. 

Sometimes I feel my emotions nowhere. Some days, I am beside myself watching life pass me by. I think if I try hard enough on these days, I can reach out and touch this girl, a hand on the shoulder, a brush of my finger against her cheek. I can be the proof of hope, proof that there is something work living towards, for her. When emotions fail to manifest in her body, I can see the desperation in her eyes. I am looking in the mirror.

Above all, though, I feel love in my belly, in the depths of my stomach. I could never eat again and still be full from all the love I harbor in my body. That’s the thing with love; despite the anger and grief that possess my hands and the loneliness that sings in my chest, love is always there beneath it all. What are anger and grief and loneliness if not the pre-existing love that used to prevail? Love for my friends, for my favorite book, for the one song I can’t get out of my head, for the crisp breeze that reminds me fall is almost here. It’s like I’m taking a bite whenever I receive a phone call from my favorite person. Another bite when I hug my parents. Another bite when I sit outside just to feel the sun on my face. I am in love-- not with a person, but the feeling of it. The feeling of holding love, of having love in me. When my stomach hurts, it’s just another reminder that I am proof that love exists in this world.  

Where do you feel it most? When you laugh, what dark parts of you are you trying to hide? Don’t shield them from me. How lucky we are to feel so much. Do you not find comfort in the fact that you are not the first, and you will not be the last, human to ever feel this way? Is there no relief in the fact that despite the emptiness you may feel sometimes, a lot of the time, you will never be alone? Hold my hand. Feel all the anger I have. Put your hand against my beating heart. Do you feel the loneliness that invades my chest? It haunts me with every breath. But please, put your hands around my waist. Hold me. There, don’t you feel the love? I feel it. 

So tell me now, where do you feel it? Where?