i think i will make it out alive, actually. now what?

A piece about being alive when you were sure you wouldn't be. A piece about learning to love that.

i sit in a coffee shop and read a pdf for a history class, and i wanted to do more work but i’ve brought the wrong book, and i’ve forgotten another back in my dorm, and so i’m writing this instead, and i am trying to remember that i can in fact do this. i don’t know what this is all the time, because it changes when i look away from it for too long, and when it does look like it did a few days ago i find that i am different now, and so this is too. i am so different. i’m wearing pants that fit me and a watch and i am wearing glasses and i am so , so, utterly unrecognizable from the person i was in my junior year of highschool and yet i still see him everywhere i look. he’s in the floral button ups in my closet that it is too cold to wear and hes in the way i watched my friends play music last night - open mouthed and wide eyed leaning forward and rocking on my heels - and hes in the way i start to worry when im sitting next to people i think are pretty - worry that i’m fucking something up or reading something wrong or about to make another mistake in a long series of mistakes - and sometimes when i haven’t had the chance to shave in too long, i can see him looking out from behind my eyes in the communal bathroom mirror.

i decided four years ago that i didn’t want to die anymore, for real, for ever. i don’t remember what exactly made up my mind all those years ago. the specifics are lost in a haze, a burial shroud resting over the kid who had wanted to go back to hollywood after community college. but i know that when my parents called me to tell me i was coming home from the residential program i had been in for 10 or so days that i was so angry and scared that they were doing it too soon, that i was still broken, that i would get home and we would just have to do it again. i threw ice cubes on the ground outside to break something without breaking something and i cried in frustration and with a kind of bone-deep fear i have never fully shaken. i also know that i made it through a shitty partial hospitalization program largely out of spite and frustration at the adults around me who, to a one, failed me and the other struggling scared teenagers at nearly every turn. i know that i got the email congratulating me on getting into my top choice college in the middle of a session that i stepped out of. i know that i cheered when it said scholarship. i know that i went back in after that.

sometimes it’s all still so very hard. most of the time i fear i have no fucking idea what i’m doing. i look up at orion’s belt after three years of not speaking and ask him if he thinks i’ll be ok and he says nothing. i think about getting those herbal cigarettes again, the ones that didn’t have nicotine, or tobacco, the ones that were just an herb garden in rolling paper. i light candles and i put on lights and i try to remember to clean my room and do laundry and do dishes. i watch my breath billow out of my lungs in the early morning cold and try to remember that this is all i get. sometimes when it gets especially bad i imagine that i already died, once, when i was seventeen and miserable, and that i begged god to let me back on earth to see the sun and the moon and the stars, and swim in lakes and the sea, and feel the sweaty pulsing rhythm of the house shows my friends pull me to. i imagine that this is all a second chance, a fragile second chance, and i try to remember that one day i will say good morning to someone for the last time and won’t know it, the way i did not answer my grandmother’s text because i intended to get to it later. i really did. i swear, i swear i swear. i try to listen to my music at a lower volume so i can hear the world even through it. i think about getting a typewriter so that i can send my friends letters, more thoughtful than printer paper and arial fonts. i try to take handwritten notes even when my dysgraphia flares and my wrist burns because one day historians might find the notes i wrote about religion in japan and wonder who i was. because one day some note i wrote in the margins of a book that changed my life might escape onto the internet of the future and some teenager going through what i went through, but futuristic and neon, will look at it and realize that they have never been alone. did you know that cave paintings make me cry? did you know that they were just like us?

i am 21 and i am deciding that i will live to be at least eighty. i won’t be mad if i make it further than eighty five, but i might get cross if i live to a hundred. i am 21 and i am trying to stay on top of my studies and my readings and all these fucking french assignments. i am 21 and i am hoping beyond hope that on valentine’s day i will get an email that says i’m going abroad in the fall of 2025, and i am 21 and i am trying not to get my hopes up too high. i am 21 and i love my friends so so so so so so much. i am 21 and i am trying to go outside more often. i am 21 and i am thinking of buying a cane soon, so that my shin splints dont hurt me so bad, and decorating the cane like a wizard’s staff because i think i deserve a cool wizard cane. i am 21 and i don’t know what the next four years will look like but i know that i am here and alive and four years ago i decided that i didn’t want to die anymore. i don’t really know if i made that call or if he did. it doesn’t matter.

i think i will make it out alive, actually. i am thinking about what comes next.