i see the moon

the moon sees me

The kids in my street are playing hide and seek. I can hear one of them counting, while the others scuttle around my estate, trainers plummeting against concrete. It makes me feel very far away from myself. As though I’ve lived too many lifetimes, and have less sense than ever of where I started, who I really am. As though I could never be as carefree and light enough to play hide and seek in my tree filled cul-de-sac. But I know I feel afraid in exactly the same ways I did then. Almost as alone, barely more capable. I envy younger me in many ways, but don’t know if I could ever go back.

How has so little changed, yet also, everything?

At this moment, I feel just as terrified and in shock as the day I ran and slipped on the step leading into my house, slamming my head against the wooden floor, knees sliding across the grainy tarmac. Blood dripping from my tooth, mixing with the drool that spills out as a roar escapes my open mouth. The gut punch sensation, falling in slow motion, not able to stop the inevitable crash. ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ and ‘I’m hopeless and unable to prevent it’ existing in tandem. A mind already trying to adjust to the pain. It’s all there. I cried and cried and cried. Nothing much has changed.

I didn’t break anything - I never did. I was on the whole a cautious and careful child, minus a few thrill seeking, dopamine chasing exceptions. Forever tentative, yet now I realise, exceptionally brave. Just to exist in myself, day to day. No matter what happened, I hardly ever stopped crying.

I cry less now, but feel just as disgustingly raw, strung up, cut open and torn a thousand times over. Dissected like a poor little science frog.

Like I can never catch my breath, like someone is pushing my head down, down into the soil of my tiny garden patch, burrowing past the ‘El’s garden’ sign until there’s nothing left but a few straggles of hair. Never letting me come up for air.

I feel so exposed. Does that ever end?

I’ve been writing about the same feelings for 20 years. Will I ever stop feeling like this? Like I’ve been left out in the sun for days, baked, burning alive. 8 year old me was so brimming with love and knowledge and passion and at the same time so much anger and I never knew where to put it any of it, how or where best to channel it. I’d try to unfurl myself just to be swiftly pulled apart, my outward leaves shredded into pieces. I never pour myself into the right things or the right people; always the ones not equipped or willing to receive it. Always leaning on fruitless efforts to become something else or gain something or mutate. Will I ever understand myself? Understand anything? Not feel like I’m faking being a person? That everyone else has the answers and I’m floundering, flailing, drowning. I really should’ve learned to swim.

I’ve never felt so lost.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning, tidying, rearranging the last couple of days, between growing symptoms. Nesting. And trying to control my environment in absence of any control over anything else in my life, my body. There are many scenarios plaguing me right now, most of which I can do absolutely nothing about. Some of them have solutions - but ones that I feel completely incapable of carrying out. I’m struggling more than usual to come to terms with the lonely ditch I sit in.

Grief permeates everything, squeezes every nerve ending, nips at my senses until they’re purple and blue, tugs on my heart like a straining leash, is a constant theme amongst everything I do. It spills out uncontrollably. It’s a pungent, cloying aftershave, descending on my airway and choking me. Dragging me into its mist. Everything is so hazy here. In this awful in between land where nothing really matters, but everything does.

I can’t make sense of anything. I feel a new twist of anguish every 20 seconds, a new flavour of it spreading across my tongue. I’m falling, again, and there’s nothing to cushion my landing. There’s only myself in this void. A shoe drops from above and falls into my mouth, making its way down into my stomach, begins lurching around kicking me at sporadic intervals. I could make my grief beautiful, but that would be a lie, a disservice. It repels me, yet I want to cling to it. It’s all I know. But it’s overstaying its welcome. It drags me relentlessly back to one spot, keeps me lodged firmly in the past, despairing the present, already mourning the future. It’s an endless list of ‘I cant’s.’ There is so much I can’t do, can’t be, can’t have. There is so much lost that I want to preserve. My agency almost a mystery to me. Autonomy too.

I don’t have a handle on anything, and the rules keep changing as I try to learn how to play the game. Things feel out of control, mostly because I can’t embrace the other much needed but equally as infuriating theme, that tiptoes its way around the borders of my life. Acceptance.

My life is everything, and nothing like I ever imagined. It’s a miracle and a horror story. A dream and a nightmare. I cannot accept my lot. I can be heartily massively endlessly grateful, but it’s always ‘in spite of.’ I don’t know how to merge in my mind what I have, what I wanted, what is possible for me and come up with something I can really live in. I want to settle into myself. I want to let go of expectation. I have so much, yet so little. And I never wanted much. My dreams were often mundane, modest in comparison to many. But so devastatingly out of reach for someone like me. I might as well have been reaching for the moon.

Sometimes, when I looked up at the moon gleaming down at me as a child, I’d peer at it from under my swing seat, and convince myself it was smiling right at me. Eyes squinting into oblivion, its craters and divots would contort into something resembling expression, and become a sweet, comforting omen looking over me. I also had many nightmares about the moon opening up and swallowing me whole. I’ve never been able to stay in the light for long.