I Keep a Distance from Myself.

I feel detached from my life, or I could say, I keep a distance from myself. There is something there, stops me from feeling and being all of me.

I am scared, that I am in this body. I was born with it and will die with it. It will get ill, and it bleeds every month. It is not very good at digesting food so I get bloated every time I eat. It wants to be touched, but not lusted; wants to have sex, but scared of somebody else taking over of my own. It’s fragile, and tough at the same time. 

My eyes, to see, to cry, to trace the wrinkles on my mother’s face, to stare at water, and fire, and into the warmth of strangers’ windows on a winter night. My nose, to smell the thunderstorm evaporated from the soil,  to sniff on my lover’s skin. My mouth to talk, to have a voice so someone knows I exist, to kiss, to chew food so my stomach will digest it better.

To say I love you.

I am trapped inside this body, I will never disappear, just corrode, just become soil and dust. So someday I will feed a rose to bloom, flow in her vein, and someone will pick me up, and give me to the human they love. 

I want to be loved, but they say: you need to love yourself before being loved by someone else. Nobody taught me how to love myself. The progress I made is to not hate my hip dips, to eat food without counting the weights, to take extra deep breaths. To reject others, to stop explaining and apologizing. 

It scares me to be me, to accept that everything I have experienced is just a random mix of factors, and maybe I don’t have free will, the world is going to end one day (at least for us humans), and my parents are going to die. There is a list of things I would think twice before being born, but it was not a choice. I want to be talented, to be successful, to be liked. There are so many people out there who teaching how to do that, the “5 easy ways” and “3 simple steps”, and everything still seems so hard.

I am afraid. Afraid that in one careless moment, something will slip away quietly from me, unnoticed.

Last winter, I walked the streets of London. The buildings in the dark reminded me of Shanghai. When eyes can no longer see clearly, familiar scenes in memory appear. As if my mind is offering me comfort by building this fleeting mirage, bringing a fractured solace to a stranger's soul.

No place has ever made me feel safe. I don’t know how to fix that in myself, just as I don’t know how to stop the bubbles bursting in my stomach, or close my eyes and let sleep come. But one day, I will. That’s what drives me— to search for a place that feels like home.

Each day, I move closer, not to find safety from others, but from myself.

Perhaps I’m already there. Perhaps I only need to believe in it,

Now.

2024.07.29