My Letter To 2022 That Nobody Ever Read
This is the penultimate day of the year. I hate New Year’s. I hate the feeling, I hate all the social norms of it. I mean, I find it kind of cute the tradition of celebrating a new circle, a full circle around the Sun, but why does it have to feel this way? Dreadful? Imposing? Fake? As the years’ pass, as I get older, it seems that there’s less and less to celebrate, less to feel happy about. But maybe that’s just my chronic depression speaking up. I wish I was this happy and excited for a new beginning.
At every end of the year, I feel the same, I feel contemplative. I feel out of place and sad. It all seems like a very long dawn, like this infinite 3am where everything is fragile and possible. Where all your life seems so little but strangely beautiful. And your mistakes seem bigger than they’re. And you feel insignificant in comparison with everything else. Dawns make me more depressed than the nights and days. So you can imagine how I feel at the end of the year.
This year is stranger than normal. I feel this strange feeling of telling my loved ones that I love them. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t suicidal. Normally I’m not a sentimental person, and normally I’m a suicidal one, so imagine how they’ll feel when I vomit words of affection on them out of nowhere. But I don’t know, in the middle of my weirdness, I think about them a lot. About how my life is better, in a way, because of them. I think about all the good things and the bad ones too. All of it matters, even when it hurts. But we have to hurt, right? One way or another, it is part of life. Of course, we don’t have to stay in a place or with someone that hurts us just because it is part of life, but what I’m trying to say is that I embrace the bad things too. All these people, the ones who stayed, they’re worth going through hard times.
The thing is… I can’t pinpoint what it is. I don’t know how it’s for other people, but I always felt things stronger than I would think is acceptable. It is always these overwhelming feelings, like an enormous wave that don’t leave room for me to breathe. And when it passes, I’m so weak that I don’t have the strength to keep my head above the water. I always think about how my body is too small. Too fragile. How does it feel to be a star? Big and hot, is probably the answer. I want to feel big. Sometimes I think my body is too small for all the things I feel. Sometimes I think it’ll collapse. I often think about all the atoms in my body, do they feel what I feel? Does my sadness make them react? Does my happiness? Does anything? I wish I could feel them, the energy, I think only that would make me feel alive. Only that would make me realize that I’m alive and this is the only life that I have. That this is it and I should make something about it. But we know I can’t exactly feel the energy in my atoms, not like I’m expecting to, so I just go on living like I always do. Like I’m too small and life would be fine without me.
This year was strange, to say at least. A lot of good things happened, but a lot of bad ones too. I felt sadness for the very first time in a long, long time. I fell in love, or so everybody says. I still don’t know what it’s to be in love, I don’t know the patterns, the sensations, I just repeat what everybody says. And all that seems fake and so out of character for me. But the important thing about this is that it didn’t work out. And then I suffered like I hadn’t in a very long time. But it made me closer to my friends, so maybe this is a win.
I didn’t write a lot, I wish I had. I wrote a little something for that crush of mine, I don’t even know if they liked it. All they ever said is that it was intense. As if I didn’t know. As if I didn’t know that everything I do is intense, and not because I want to be different, but simply because I was born feeling everything like an exploding star. As if I liked it, I hate it most of the time, I’m constantly thinking my body is going to break because it can’t take that much feeling. It is too small. I’m too fragile. I didn’t read many books, and I can’t seem to wrap my mind long enough to concentrate. But if I’m gonna write about all that I couldn’t or didn’t do, we’re gonna be here for a while. It’s a long list, and I don’t remember most of it.
Good things happened too. When I was in love, or so I thought so, everything felt alive. The skies, the food, the people, the air. Everything felt like a song, the kind you always repeat to have that same feeling over and over again. I felt big, bigger than my own body. Sadly, it didn’t last long. I also went to Scotland, I played football on the streets with loads of strangers. I drank so much beer, I felt so happy, so big, and so fulfilled. Everything seemed like magic. I had a good birthday, which is strange because my birthdays aren’t that much fun. This is also a long list, and I don’t remember most of it, so let’s stop here.
Lately, everything feels ephemeral. Like a porcelain doll, like a newborn baby, like a sand castle in windy weather. Like it could end any minute now. It may have. I wish it had. I don’t know if it’s just me or does other people feel like that. If so, why don’t they say something? Why don’t they scream? Graffiti on the walls? Write a fucking song about it? Why aren’t people doing something? It feels like the world is ending and nobody seems to care. Are we all suicidal? Is it suicidal to want everything to end because we’re fucking tired and we are failing again and again? We are failing and our wins seem so useless, so small. Feels like we’re losing a war against ourselves. Or maybe, I’m just projecting. Maybe everyone is fine. I hope everyone is fine. But we know we aren’t.
This is supposed to be a letter to 2022. A letter nobody will read. But, as usual, it’s just ramblings. Just thoughts I have to put on a digital paper because if I say those things to my friend he’ll say I’m a maniac because nobody thinks those things. Why isn’t nobody thinking about those things? Is it just me thinking about how I’m incredibly limited? In my body, in my only life, in my choices.
The universe is infinite. Infinite. And we are incredibly insignificant. We can’t be all those things we want to be, do all those things we want to do, or say all those things we want to say. All because we are finite. But life isn’t. It goes on, and on, even if we aren’t here. Even if there’s nothing. It still goes on. Time, space, energy. And we can feel those things to a certain degree but never in plenitude. Never completely. Doesn’t that drive you crazy? The universe is here but we can’t touch it. Can’t actually touch someone because our atoms don’t touch each other. There’s always a barrier. Even if it is an insignificant one. We are always apart. And for me, most of the time, this distance is so loud and so big, that it makes me feel like I’m drifting to another Universe, another space and time.
There’s so much I’ll never know. It’s a suitable feeling for some people, but it always bugs me. It always makes me sad that there’s so much out there that I — we — will never know, see, or feel. How tortuous to create an infinite supply of sensations but narrow the beings that can feel them to feel just a few. I always want more and maybe that’s my Achilles’ heel. Maybe that will be my downfall, I’ll always be searching for more and I’m gonna die in the search for it. Because we can’t have it all. We have to be ok with only having a few. How dull and boring that feels.
As I write this, I’m reminded by Instagram that today marks one year since I had a date with a guy I used to go out within 2019. It was really good. I thought “this is it!”, I’m gonna enter the new year in the best way possible. Well… one month from that day we had a tremendous fallout that followed me through the year. It followed me in my relationship with my, then, crush, it followed me in my relations with friends, it followed me in therapy, and it followed me everywhere. It followed me on my path back to him, and now I’m finishing the year and he’s still in my life but this time around I don’t think “this is it”, I just think this is just something, one of many things that don’t necessarily have to have an explanation. It just is. What this is I really don’t want to know.
I don’t know how to end this. I don’t know how to conclude because if I’m being honest I don’t know what I was trying to say. I’m just vomiting words on my keyboard in the hopes it leaves me. In the hopes that I feel better. Hoping that I’m not alone. How can I be? There are 7,837 billion people right now breathing the same air as I do. There’s gotta be someone who just feels like I do. We have the same sky. The same air. The same seasons. The same sun. Why can’t we have the same feelings? I don’t know if I’ll meet one of those people, but I hope one of them reads this and just knows we’re alike.
As said — kind of — by my second favorite Doctor: 2022, I let you go.
