At night I feel alive

notes on a distinctive mood

At night I think about my best friend who moved away, I think about his brilliance and openheartedness, the ways we’ve cared for and challenged each other, and I think about how preposterous it is that I was able to find a friendship like this, a person like him, even just once in this lifetime.

At night I think about my parents, about how lucky I am that I can still give them a call, that I’m still their child in the moments that I don’t feel so strong.

At night I think about how I have so much love inside me it hurts, how I don’t take enough chances to tell people how much I think about them and miss them.

At night I think about how badly I want to live, how precious this life is, how every mistake and regret was worth it, I think about how we are all on this little boat riding the waves, trying to stay upright, trying to make the most of what’s given to us.

At night I think about how one day I’ll be gone, and maybe my friends will remember me for the way I made them feel, maybe some of them will look back on these words and hold on to a small piece of me, how I’ll somehow someway still be there for them.

At night I think about how strange it is to be able to say “for some period of time I existed,” and I feel sadness and happiness at all of this at once, and I wonder if sacred experience is this feeling when all of the emotions are superimposed onto each other into something I can barely put to words.

At night I think about how time doesn’t stop hurtling forward, but every now and then, if I close my eyes and look at the darkness in just the right way, it feels like time has stopped, or I have stepped outside of it, and I wonder if I’m something more vast than all of these things I see and hear and think.

At night I think about how one day I’ll be 40, one day I’ll be 60, one day I’ll be 80, and one day I’ll be a bunch of dirt and fertilizer underneath the grass. I think about the song I Have Never Loved Someone the Way I Love You, the one that goes: “when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard, I will send you all my love upon the breeze.”

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Cover art credit to Alisa Onipchenko-Cherniakovska.