Kiana

I sit longer than I should in this cafe with lights that hurt my eyes. I’m with two acquaintances: One tells me that they lost their virginity two weeks ago; the other shows me the artwork and stickers he got in an art fair three hours ago. I ask for one sticker which had a Lichtenstein-esque print of a lady on a telephone saying “OHHH, ALRIGHT” on it because it reminds me of me. I put the sticker on my laptop, ripping and removing the two old stickers whose prints have faded over time.

I’m in this cafe for a spoken word event. The brochure said it will start at 7 PM, but it’s now half past 7. The place overflows with people. The air conditioner barely works. We are left to clamor for breath, a hopeless attempt to steady everyone’s rising body temperature. Science can speak for this phenomenon.

What science can’t speak for is the heaviness in my chest as I sit here looking, looking. At a nearby table six teenagers are discussing the individual characters and personalities of their friends who obviously aren’t there at present. I observe them for quite a time, 20 minutes or so, and then turned to my friend sitting next to me and told them, “You know, when I am talking about other people with other people, it feels OK and natural, and like, not that big of a deal. But when I closely watch people talking about other people with other people, it makes me wonder what’s the point.” They just shrugged and nodded, a dangerous combination which could mean they truly understood, or they didn’t, not completely.

A friend once told me that our hearts are like stained glass windows. We can either add more metallic salts to the glass (apparently this is how stained glass windows are colored!) and color them as much as we’d like to, or we can just leave it at that, a normal and plain stained glass window out of all the stained glass windows of the world. I don’t quite understand this allegory, but I remember it now thinking about how I ache so much for the world that sometimes I don’t have enough room for the light to seep through. Like I’m allowing the world to add more metallic salts to my heart’s glass so its colour would turn out more vivid, even though I actually can’t see the light anymore. The colours in my stained glass window are not colours of my choosing and interest, but of the world’s. Sometimes I lie awake at night after a long day of floating at school and miss being a third grader who can finish a whole colouring book in one sitting and enjoy the heck out of it. Or, like, the feeling of being 15 and not caring what others think about your version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” because for you it’s enough that you worked hard for it and had fun along the way (see: a feeling I never did once feel).

How do I reconcile myself with the truth that I’m never gonna go back to being 15, with all the time and energy and space to do what I want to do? How do I reconcile myself to truths that hurt, truths that I can’t change, and go on living? ♦