Lonely Body

 Tuesday December 9th 9:33 a.m.

I didn’t think I would feel cool air for months. I didn’t think I would smell the comforting burn piles of winter. Yet, here I am. Most days I catch wind of something being sent back to the earth. Each morning, I feel the air prickle on my skin and ease me into the world. 

Last night it hit me just how lonely I am. I’ve been working on pausing and feeling my emotions. When I laid down for bed I noticed that my heart began to beat faster, the opposite of what anyone wants at that time. I thought of the possible opinions the people around me might think about me. 

Eventually I asked myself, what are you really feeling/ thinking right now? I want to be accepted. I want people to like me. Then, as the pain in my chest became more prominent and localized, it hit me that all of these thoughts were trying to mask how lonely I felt.

I have a lot of different feelings in my chest, and this one was different from those. It was much sharper and it rang out in another tone. Normally my pains are off to the left, or the right, up higher or down lower. This one was the closest to the middle I have noticed, since I’ve started noticing. 

I’ve been having Christian sing me to sleep most nights. I decided not to tonight, to let the loneliness spread through me, to try to cope with it on my own. I had a dream before I left about how the loneliness of being here would feel. I was laying on a bed, anxious, and feeling like people could easily watch me, and they could because I was in a small room with the curtains open. 

In real life, it was different. Yes, I was anxious. But I wasn’t as afraid. I knew what was happening. I could think of solutions. I could remind myself that my loved ones are only a call away. I could remind myself that I am my own, that I can always comfort myself. It’s still hard for me to fully grasp how one can be complete on their own. 

I can sing myself a song (and I did). I can run my hands over my arms, I can massage my scalp. I can tell myself that everything will be okay. I can feel my body, every inch of it. Only I can feel what’s going on inside of me, and what in the world could be more intimate than that? 

As I was falling asleep, I thought about how we think, and speak our thoughts to ourselves through our heads. I imagined speaking through my feet, my chest, my neck, my stomach, everywhere. I imagined a mouth speaking out of all of these places. Why do all of our thoughts come from our minds, when our whole body is working to transmit the messages? 

I’m telling you all of this from my mind right now, yet my hands are bringing these thoughts into reality. I’m a little bit afraid of trusting my entire body, like if I entangle my soul with the rest of me I will become trapped in it eternally. My argument to that is that no matter what religion you believe, for the most part, the body is seen as a vessel. And I think, as such, we are allowed to inhabit every inch of it, and use it to experience this world to the fullest.