*Originally posted on February 7, 2014*
Sometimes I can get to this wonderfully exhausted place in the day, where I become extremely emotional, reflective, and artistic. It reminds me of being 17, with every emotion right on the surface, feeling like the world is so big, and I am so small, feeling like I am but a speck on the wonderfully white canvas of my unwritten masterpiece. It reminds me of having conversations into the middle of the night with my best friend. We’d talk about how inadequate we felt, how we would achieve our dreams, and how we’d never forget to remember that love is the only thing that matters. Sometimes, I can get back to that place, where love is all that matters. And I so vividly remember how it felt to feel like a tragically broken shard of a person.
I recently came across a project I did for English 11 AP. I used to be so creative in the way that I expressed my feelings. The dark ones that were cries for help, the bright ones that carried my dreams through to my twenties. I want to be that seventeen year old again. I want to experiment with words in the way that only a broken, confused, lonely teenage girl can.
But I’m happy now. I’m in love. I don’t ache from the hollows of my being, feeling each tear resonate in the empty cavity of my chest, as I cry myself to sleep and bargain with God for love. The cavern that was my seventeen year old shell of a person is now filled with a deliciously warm, gooey, honey coloured light. He slowly started to drip his warmth into the empty tear-catcher that was my core from the very moment I saw him smile. That smile. The one that reaches up to his eyes, and tugs at the corners of his perfectly contoured lips. The one that makes my knees give way, and my thoughts flee from my brain as though running from their own vulnerability. The smile that pulls those same thoughts back, caressing their vulnerability, and finally giving them a place to rest, a place to find sanctuary.
I am no longer familiar with that vacancy of the soul that so consumed my being at seventeen. It is an emptiness felt by another person, in another life. I remember it as though it is a shadow, though there is only a slight schism separating that life from the one I embody now. That shattered semblance of a young girl is a shade of darkness, woven through the illumination he unknowingly gifted upon my body. He brought life to the dead, light to the obscurity of my essence. I bathe in the golden light he resonates; I swim in the empowerment he patiently coaxed out of me. I thrive in the warmth his presence brings.
Nikita 