Apologies for the lack of romance and the overabundance of self-indulgence in this yarn. To accept this person-to-person call, please continue reading.

 

This November, the sky has remained muddled and empty; outside, the window hung over a waned sun, and the entire month, it has felt more like an evening than a morning. All my thoughts keep reverberating through the shallow hallway of the third place I moved to this year. And they keep reminding me that some of us have no future. At my core, I am hollow. Empty. Living a faux existence. I am not virtuous, just afraid.

 

This is not me sinking into a pool of my own sentimentality; I have always known this. And I have never been able to accept this. My entire nature is of denial.

 

My face most days is a mixture of resignation and a forlorn longing. A gloom keeps pulling me in, and my self-inflicted misery makes me hate everything around me. My self-loathing is a ritual of atonement.

 

I have always survived by piling regret after regret, which is another thing I hate about myself. My primal instinct is to always run towards a knife just to prove it is sharp. 

 

Inevitably, I find myself at the altar of God, confessing only that I am unworthy to confess. To which God retorts how my only redemption is to have lived an unfulfilled life and lost potential. That I need to forfeiture all my unnecessary sorrow and all the unnecessary curse and be damned to a fate where there will never be a way for me to recall exactly what any moment ever felt like.

 

I am foreign to everything I love. I am a satellite orbiting in a Turkish tea cup, a fleeting, impermanent thing with no significance. All my rage and all my grief have made any space I occupy unmoving. Maybe it is better for me not to talk about my grief, or my rage, or whatever room they get housed in. Anyway, it will be summer tomorrow or the day after; the days will be warmer, and the sky will have a softer tone. Spring smoldering.

 

Lately, I have been forgetting to say the simplest things to the people I cherish the most. I miss you, and I still care for you. All my friends are continually doom-scrolling and have abandoned their homes to live in Canada. Everyone I have ever loved still lives in a neighbourhood in Calgary, and I am only living for that space.

 

My mother has given herself completely to the abyss; my mother is just another of those mothers who cannot love, or perhaps she loves too much. After my brother, she is still the closest to God in me. And when she asks me, “How do we leave our land? without lamenting, without whimpering”, I cannot tell her how I never could love this land, how she never let me.

 

There is no help for my kind of fucked up, I have my mother's fate, and I do not know how selfish it makes me when I think it would be easier to sympathise with her fate if she were anyone but my mother.

 

I often have nightmares where I am drowning, but those nightmares cannot hurt me. They offer me the perspective to see it is a lot easier than I thought to have a dream where the moments just roll around, and in that dream, all my pain, grief, regrets, and shortcomings will just disperse. Maybe the day I wake up from that dream will be tragic, or maybe it will be perfectly ordinary. I want to sleep holding on to this fleeting, ephemeral dream for as long as I can.

 

All my sufferings in the name of self-growth, finding myself, and my frivolous attempt at writing my truth are all distractions. Even if I came across my truth, I would never have the courage to face it.

 

I keep going the distance even more than I had yesterday. I keep trying to find new perspectives, but no amount of distance or perspectives seems enough for me to save myself. I keep gnawing and gouging my own skin to avoid grovelling to my own insignificance. Now, all that is left is to wait until an unexpected death, a fruitless end. That comes no matter how grand a hero is or how holy a person.

 

Loneliness can hurt, especially someone who does not understand why they are alone. Living is an inherently messy endeavour, devoid of clear lines and easy answers. My fate is on an Euclidean line, and those lines form a plane and then a space filled with everything I have ever let go, with claw marks on them. Just like Mitya, I ask the birds for forgiveness for my brother, not because he is to be blamed for anything, but what else am I supposed to do? And when the birds have left my field of vision I deliberate on if my brother ever asked to be the less loving one.

 

The rain where I am from is harsher and does not look as clean as it does here, but it is the only thing that numbs the anxiety the city gives me. Most nights, I am so filled with anxiety, so heightened with it, that it makes me want to burst into tears. Instead, I just write long and rambling accounts about feelings, people and situations that you will never find an answer to if you think too hard about them.

 

I have fifty-three entrance wounds in my body and only two exit wounds. For me, the definition of barbarity and love is the same. I have a sliver of ice stuck in my throat, and I cannot write about love without spelling death. I have scrawled my apologies and grievances about how it has taken thirteen more years than it should have for my poems to reach the women they were written for on the ribcages of entirely different women.

 

Now, more than anything, I want to disappear and leave nothing behind. That nothingness will give my life meaning; it will be why I can finally smile without care even after I am gone