I miss you isn’t enough
Trigger warning: Mentions suicide and depression
I never liked the month of May.
When I was younger, it reminded me of the end of things.
The end of the school year.
Exams.
The end of the uni year.
Coming home.
The Karachi heat.
But for two years now May has etched a hole into my very existence.
And as the calendar date changes from April to May, my heart quickens and my body numbs.
Because I don’t want this month to begin.
It’s too dark.
It’s too much.
And I’m not sure I can handle it.
All the bandages I use to wrap myself up during the other 11 months are ripped off
and I’m standing, looking at the month of May as it attacks my senses and reminds me of what I’ve lost.
Every tool I’ve used to begrudgingly rebuild my broken insides — the therapy, the isolation, the writing, drawing, reading, teaching, exercising — all of it merely quicksand as I continue to fall deeper.
I never did do a good job rebuilding at all.
Paper houses. If your very foundation is cracked — it’ll never stand tall.
It’s May.
And your face grows larger in my memory.
I ache for your company.
And my body crumbles.
I lay here in the bed I made myself and I relive every single moment of that day. When my eyes open in the morning. When I close them at night. I can’t stop reliving it.
The other day, I dreamt of you.
My dreams of you are abstract and complex, always filled with anxiety, because I know you’ll leave. Even as I wake up, I explore the meanders of your face.
I don’t have words for missing you.
How can I?
How can the word missing even come close to explaining what I feel?
The slicing of my heart into pieces. The anxiety that shatters me until I can’t look at my reflection anymore. The delusion I have built myself into to allow myself to ease back into society. The smile I have carefully sewn onto my face during the day so people deem me as acceptable.
It all collapses.
Because even in my dreams, it haunts me.
That listless feeling of my life moving too far away from you.
Of too much happening without you here.
Of me growing.
And you, eternally young and 24.
In my dreams, I crawl back to our younger years when life was easy and pain was a game we used to play to tell ourselves that we could feel anything but invincible.
Now, I feel anything but invincible.
I feel the fear. Real-raw-terrifying-fear that plants its seeds into my mind as I tackle my way through this new grim reality.
I miss you.
It’s not enough.
I miss you.
It’ll never be enough.
I’ll keep saying it.
Maybe one day, years from now, I’ll find enough words, enough to encompass the way I feel and plaster them onto my flesh so I never forget.
I miss laughing with you.
I wish I could have been the comfort you needed. I keep wishing, maybe because it’s better than the guilt I have felt, and continue to feel every day of my life after you.
Because now it’s just that. After.
I try to reach out to the girl I was up until that 17th of May:
Do I look like her?
Is my laughter the same?
Is the air I breathe still the same?
I don’t have the answers but life stutters along.
People don’t want to talk about suicide. They want glitter overflowing on their feeds. They want cookie cutter images of girls. They want beauty. Discomfort is a part of living. Life isn’t all that it’s chalked up to be and we need to acknowledge that.
We’ve become so comfortable with social media friendships — thinking seeing a friend’s Instagram story tells you they’re okay, or seeing their name pop on a whatsApp group chat is enough — it isn’t.
Checking in is important. I’ll never take a friendship for a granted now. Real conversation is the only thing that makes a person feel better. I could type up 20 white lies with my mantras of “I’m fine, I’m doing good, I’m alright” when in reality, I’m probably not.
Think about the people you value and let them know.
It could change everything.
