something cosmic

entry no. 10 ⸻ letters, lost and found

GIF by Anna Firth

“Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried
my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have
served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine.
I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread,
or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.”(Bluets, Maggie Nelson)

1. I entered this world with a purple face, a bank of tears behind my eyes, and pressure around my neck as if to keep me from overflowing. I was born filled to the brim with carried emotion. I needed to cry. Though I couldn’t, even in my most primal state, because, well, there was no passageway of release. I was wrapped around myself. But then I became undone, and the cries came, swiftly and unforgiving. After the briefest beat of silence, the split second when my mother had yet to comprehend I was then a body separate from hers, my cries burst out of me and bombarded the room with the shrieks of a child who didn’t understand. I reckoned with my existence in a way that can only be explained as visceral, guttural, violent. I think to myself as I sit here writing this, removing the mask I occasionally don, and realize these cries, these infantile cries, never left me. Though they may at times sound different. I feel the echoes as they vibrate in the hollow spaces of my chest. Water dripping steadily from the stalactite of a cave. A faint metronome of tears masking itself behind the beat of my heart.

2. Why feel the need to defend yourself against someone reaching their arm out with nothing but a fistful of love? Against – that, in itself, was never the case. Never against. Always for. Perhaps your characterization of against is not toward but away. It’s okay, I understand. It’s just that I don’t think we speak the same tongue. When I said I love you, you heard, you must love me too. No part of this was obligatory, except for the end. It wasn’t always like that, but then came a time when it was. The potential transitioned to the present. The potential is malleable, but the present exists as a single state. I was a ball of terracotta thrown and shaped into whatever form I once was, a vase or plate or what have you. I don’t remember. Can you? All I know is that someone dropped me, then I shattered, and bits of my red-orange flew every which way.

3. Care is a verb with a recipient. It requires movement to be true. If the supposed care does not exist to anyone other than oneself, I presume this stagnancy would negate the existence of such a thing in the first place. He told me he cared, but where? Where did it go, if not towards me? I said everything. At times, I pity the fact he said nothing for I know how heavy the burden of words withheld can be.

4. I think of that July back home and wonder what it all had been. In the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, in a friend’s backyard pool, I looked across the water and she told me was moving somewhere, elsewhere. We all were. Clinging to pool floats, our feet traced each other’s beneath the surface. She confessed she had felt something, and I confessed I had too, but neither of us knew what it meant at the time. Then we moved, somewhere, elsewhere.

5. Yesterday, I found in my mailbox the letter I sent to him all of those months ago. I thought my words may have been lost. But no, no, they were returned to me. To: me. Around the world and back home. The envelope was ripped open from the sides, its contents still folded precariously inside. Stamps from September, December. Happy Holidays! inked atop the postage. I held in my hands tangible evidence of what I once felt for him, for myself. I suppose it never reached him because it was never meant to. I threw the letter away. At first I felt a bit bad, but I don’t think I do anymore.

6. I am reminded that our lives are held in a space with something cosmic. Some things cosmic. What is it to be cosmic? I am not sure. Perhaps it could mean to exist adjacent to darkness and lightness, instantaneousness and delay, explosions and holes. In a sense, to be cosmic may be to encompass the extremities of feeling within and without. My body has shown my being within. The world has shown my being without.

7. Between the strobes of light, the memory of her face lingered in the space she passed through. I felt her gaze on me, and then I didn’t, only to turn around and find her right next to me. She grabbed my hand and held my cheek and said, You’re beautiful. I kissed her and our bodies collided. She didn’t take me, but held me (even if just for a moment), and placed me right back in the spot where she found me. I swear it was this gentle tactility that healed the bit of my heart still torn. She didn’t need to stay, but she still cared, just as I didn’t need to stay, but still, I care.

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Thank you for reading — as always it means so, so much to me. For my words to be worth your time is quite the honor.

With love and care,

Kailie