Dear August,

I'm back to feeling again. Like pain of a belly ache. What met me on the other side was not anger over fate beyond control. Only longing: for late humid nights walking the streets of a city not ours, the lights of electric green and red, your sweaty face of tanned skin and half-smiling eyes. The strides long and lost, leaving behind, waiting ahead. What happened to motorcycle rides? To dimlit tunnels? To cigarette smoke and tea with cold milk in the morning? To staring for ages through glass windows over buildings and people down below? Only nostalgia for things lost and never found to begin with. How replaying a song to a 90s ending captured it all and gave me back my feeling.

As I lay in the same place over and over again, looking up at the same thing over and over again, growing up yet never changing, in a room so small: I felt the vastness of the world and the endless chase of feeling. The movement of a little heart, the pain of it all. How thoughts couldn't articulate the loss, the hollowness, but at the same time, a small bit of hope so heavy, so full. I remembered possessing this, constantly, in my youth ‒ and what have I done with it? How did it end?

The pulses of feeling rang back in my ears and I heard it as I lay my head on the pillow. I could almost see it, like ray of light, and taste it, like metal on the tongue. But all I could do was sigh. What time and space afforded to me in youth was gone, and now we must run fast straight ahead always, always. The vows at an altar, the pains of childbirth, the sacrifices of parenthood, the numbness of a day job and paying bills and saving up for a future so defined and standard, the prayers against sickness and accidents. Will you be there to meet me? Will you ride with me through the tunnel deep in the night? Drive your motorbike, swerve into lanes? Sometimes I feel you so close, within reach, but then I never know where you are.

And so an antidote to feeling: scrolling through the lives of strangers, past lives I could be living. Oh I've gone to this place but not really, I said. How I missed the few steps to the harbor, to the corner shop with the bold red sign. Were the scenes on the screen more real than memory? How did the scenes on the screen bring me back to feeling? Rather than being there and walking on my own two feet. How I felt so out of my body, a spectator of my own life. Yet here, among strangers, distant and old though their youth forever preserved, I was back to myself again, my old self, whoever she might be. And I'm back to feeling again. But it's too difficult to explain in words, to explain to myself even. So how did it end, I said. Drowning out. Scrolling past. Replaying. Going back to default, on autopilot. Rinse, repeat. Perhaps such were the antidotes to feeling.

with love,

abelink