Do you ever think about a book and then wonder what the last person who also read it and related to it was doing or if they were okay?
Because right now I want to write something but I honestly don’t know what to say. My thoughts are lying face down on the floor with passion and I just wish someone could put a blanket over them and tell them they’re fine. And I swear it’s like every book makes me sad in a different way but really… it’s all the same. So yeah. I guess I’m just going to keep arranging words until something slips out and everyone claps and someone feels something?
“I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.”
This book was so full of sadness and loneliness that it might as well have been made of it.
You’re reading and your heart feels like someone is crushing it so slowly with a combine harvester and you just want to lay your head down on a soft bread roll and maybe just be quiet for a bit. You’re reading and lying on your side and a little tear trickles into your ear (which is the most tragic of all eye moisture) because you’re both sad and dramatic and listening to this song and thinking that your heart would actually envelop Marin in blankets if it had arms or blankets.
It goes like this:
Marin’s story starts and you know something tragic has happened and she’s left everything behind but you don’t know the whys or the hows. You guess maybe it has something to do with her grandfather and the things left unspoken and unanswered (like the room where she never set foot and the picture he “couldn’t” find). Or maybe it was Mabel and somewhere between them walking to the beach in sweats with a blanket and alcohol and sitting on the shore kissing and the three thousand miles she traveled to see her… something went terribly wrong.
See at this point, you don’t really know Marin’s story, but something about her words and feelings resonates with you so accurately, so intimately. There’s no tangible plot yet but still… it feels as if someone has dipped their finger in a lake of you and made a ripple that goes on and on and on.
You understand her kind of lonely.
The kind of lonely that doesn’t depend on your surroundings, that doesn’t give a shit about the 85 unanswered messages from people who genuinely love and care about you, that is engrained so deep in your soul it’s like you’re permeable and your own skin can’t protect you from it.
The kind of lonely that just makes you want to hide inside yourself more, reminding you that you’re just an insignificant blip in the infinite structure of the universe, brought into this physical reality when you wish you could just exist fleshlessly in your head so they can’t see you and you can’t let them down.
You understand her kind of sad.
The kind of sad where it’s not enough to feel sad, you have to feel guilty for feeling sad because you feel as if you’re manipulating the people around you by being sad. You’re constantly berating yourself for making a separate physical entity stop the process of their life just to make sure your bricks were still up in a wall. You’re constantly afraid that you’re being too sad, too loudly, too obviously, that you have dug yourself into a bottomless hole of self-pity and the walls are too high to see anyone else’s problems but your own and you’re so terrified it’s going to ruin your relationship with everyone.
The kind of sad that is just not fair because you haven’t earned it—when your life is in an objectively good place but then it all comes back at once and there is no escape—you have fallen back again into a destructive mindset and you’re trying so hard but it keeps pulling you back in and you feel as if you’re losing your grip on yourself and you’re just going to keep shrinking until you can barely feel yourself there anymore.
And something about all of these things combined still makes me feel dangerously close to tears.
“I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.”
But what this book tells you is this: you will be okay.
That loneliness in the moment is no guarantee of loneliness in the future. That feelings are transient and situations change and we just need to get through this rough patch to the place where things are better. That you can be content and happy but little twinges of sadness will always seep in and it’s okay, because happiness has never been a fixed point in one’s life and life is just a series of challenges and ups and downs and you must learn to go with the flow.
That it can be hard and it’s another day in the bathroom stall, sobbing for five minutes. Another day of giving in to depression naps in the middle of the day, another day of being unable to leave from under your duvet.
But then happy shows up.
And it’s your cat purring on your lap, it’s curling up on the couch with a book, it’s a girl smiling at you on the train, it’s a small unexpected kindness from a stranger, it’s a rainy night and blankets and your soul is warm, it’s a lovely comment a stranger left on your review, it’s some stupid meme your friend sent you because it reminded them of you, it’s finding money in your jeans pockets, it’s in coffee shops and bookstores and sunsets and your great grandmother’s embrace, it’s your best friend coming home from college in two weeks, it’s your otp being canon and an uploaded new chapter of your favorite webcomic.
Happy will show up. And you will learn to find it even if it’s not where you expected it.
And you will be okay.
“it’s a dark place, not knowing. It’s difficult to surrender to. But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.”