It’s 2 am right now. I suddenly get up with an increased heartbeat, as if my heart is pounding outside my chest. I sit up and start to wonder. Is all of this real? What if it isn’t? Have I grown in the past few years? Have I met all those people that I talk to every day now? Was I meant to? Or am I only 17, sitting in my bedroom making up a story to write? And the people that I talk to, in actuality, represent emotions for me to cope with the hustle.
My mind suddenly filled with numerous thoughts overflowing from my eyes. The lump in my throat makes me feel sick. And I start to think.
The way we love people is more about them or ourselves? Our experiences, trauma, and memories make up the part of us that handles relationships. I don’t think that’s the part that falls in love in actuality.
We love what we know.
But, when we experience silences, fights, hurtful conversations, is it us? Is it the same person that performed the “falling” in love? We change in love, definitely. We evolve. But do we always know if the changes are positive or negative? No. And that scares me. What if all that I’m considering “growth” and “resilience” right now is actually going to be piled-up trauma and unhealthy coping mechanisms in the future?
I question everything around me, but I don’t think I’ll reach the answers if I don’t experience the journey. I wish there could be a way to skip it, but why? Why don’t positive experiences weigh more than the negative ones when we start to think about it as a whole? The laughs, the affection, the staring-at-each-other-and-smiling-like idiots, the interlocking of hands while walking. All of it is magical. But in the end, does it really outweigh the other things?
I don’t know for sure.
So I pen down, open the windows, look at the moon, and smile, then go to bed, and try, to sleep all over again, just like everything else.
-Avni Verma