The Life of a Love Girl

I have agendas and affirmations and attributes.

Meditate, yoga, journal, journal, journal. Talk to yourself. Think about your thinking.

“The most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself”

“Find someone who suffers well” “Embodify the love that you want for yourself”

“Love is not enough” - Mark Manson.

Now, I wake up with a heavy heart with scars that need tending from times I don’t remember. “We are doing something wrong. Something is off its mark. Where are we going wrong?”

I run to my friends and I scribble on my black chart and write really long letters and leave them under my bed. Every curse is a prophecy, but not every prophecy has to be a curse. November gushes towards me like an untameable river. You are supposed to be mine, but you have forgotten my name and my heart.

Do you understand the amount of hatred and pain and loss it took to be this loving and kind and true and gentle and optimistic? It’s arduous to be a love girl. 

Night after night I stare at ceiling and chant, “failure is the mother to all successes” 

I have tried so hard to fill this void that I managed to convince myself there wasn’t one in the first place. 

And I didn’t ask for too much. A shoulder to lean on when it rains. A hand to hold when I stumble. A companion. But, it pours and pours and I’m stranded with a broken umbrella and botched book of auroras. 

No, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to feel so much. I didn’t ask to become a ridiculously optimistic person. I didn’t run away from my home to join a circus. But, they clicked my picture and made me the face of it. When I tried to run away, they pushed me off the plank into the ocean of darkness. I made my own sunshine until my nails and eyes bled. I perfectly saw through the void and deception. 

It’s no longer about a person, but it’s about a feeling. To do so much work and to be so much and to give so much, what a lonely existence. What a miserable curse. A rotten tooth. To shine and shine and to be so radiant that you blind the sunflowers. 

I prayed for this, I wrote poetry for this, I pushed myself for this. 

For it to finally stop being about someone else and start being about myself. Now, it’s finally about me. 

The creature sits beside me, “You finally see me” 

“I do”

And it hurts. It hurts so badly. You were always too intense for the people you fell for. They drowned and clung onto lifeboats to escape. 

No one told you how it feels to be so rogue and passionate in the world of such shallow hearts. Of people who dream of the depth, of people who think they belong to the depth, but they aren’t ready. They aren’t made for it. They were made in the depths where they don’t belong. They are too scared of their homes and its darkness.

I didn’t belong here as well, but I made it my empire. This is what they mean by conquer. I was pushed to the bottomless pit of grief and I carved my initials on my own grave. I sat by the darkness and I let it consume me, but I didn’t let it defeat me. I cracked the formula and god, it’s heavy. It’s heavy and painful and now, I have nothing to lose.

I’m supposed to be free, but the price I paid takes its toll. 

I am going to be 23, but I have lived several lifetimes now. 

I have been a mother to my mother, a father to myself, a teacher to my lovers, a friend, a soulmate, a widow. 

You talk about absurdism and I point to myself. 

No, wait. You aren’t supposed to associate yourself with the past. You are supposed to leave it behind. You are a product of your past and not a prisoner.

Remember remember remember. Look at the quote on your wall.

“The windshield is bigger than the rearview” “You are the universe experiencing itself”

“Enlightenment is a top down approach”

But it makes me cry. Everything that’s ever happened to me. It makes me angry and holler at the injustice. None of this was supposed to happen to me. Why did it happen to me? But, these are questions with no answers. Absurdism.

So, now I make more agendas and affirmations and attributions. 

I sit as the discomfort strangles me, “why won’t you just die?”

I breathe in defiance, “I will live until death himself comes to hold my hand”

Because discomfort is also proof of my living.

You see, being a love girl is not just about being in love with a person. It’s about being in love with life despite whatever lemons and coconuts and bricks it throws at you. It’s about watching your lover die and writing a book to monumentalize his existence. It’s about watching your lover walk away and embracing yourself. It’s about when you grow up in a house of ruins and still get the courage to attempt to build a home that’s not broken.

It’s about watching the said home fall apart again and again and again and still continuing to build again and again and again. It’s about carrying the sadness of all your lifetimes and still believing you will attain happiness in the next one. 

It’s about hope. It’s knowing hope is not golden magical light from a beautiful fairytale, but hope is wiping the ugly tears and snot and calling your friend, it’s hugging a yellow capybara to sleep when you can’t stop thinking about 23rd of November, it’s listening to the songs that make you cry on repeat until it doesn’t, it’s the ink stains on your palm after you scribble on your journal, it’s listening to your mind whisper all the bad and sad things that could happen and still being able to convince it otherwise. 

Hope is ugly. Hope is faith. Hope is knowing that stars shine through the night. Hope is stupid. Hope sits in caves, but knows that it’s not trapped. Hope is bleeding and knowing that it’s not the end. Hope is knowing every broken thing can be put together again. Every scar that will heal.

Hope is giving love and love and love and knowing one day it will find you. Hope is knowing whatever goes around comes around. Hope is knowing that nothing is eternal and accepting the fleeting nature of the universe.

Hope is a love girl who tries again and again and again, like an obsessed scientist who won’t stop until she solves the equation (or a sudoku puzzle). Because you only need one answer and as long as you keep trying again and again and again, the odds are always in your favour. 

Signing off, 

A Love Girl.