Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Dear everyone,

Oh, April.

After December's bad break-up and his subsequent suicide I fell to more pieces than I'm even made up of, and in January I reflexively followed through on a little poem I'd had in my head for a while. I bought tickets for a solo trip to Italy. I knew in my fingertips that I needed room to breath. Remember that part in The Secret Garden where Mary finally gets inside and sees all of the little plants choking in the weeds? Without knowing quite what she's doing she gets down in the dirt and clears some space for them. It was like that. Somewhere in between all of my bones I knew that I needed a line to something else, a carrot on a string, a way to keep myself from being pulled under by the tide of my own self-loathing.

I've spent the last few months flashing a lot of jazz hands at a lot of people, pulling a lot of rabbits out of a lot of hats, and inside my head going very slowly and terrifyingly mad. All this time, April has been the point. I knew that I was expending all of my energy trying to make people not worry about me, and that if I could just make it to long silent train rides and heart-stoppingly beautiful vistas I could reset what had been broken. In private. I needed to be wrung out like a dirty sponge.

I suppose I could have met more people in Italy, but going hours and hours without speaking to anyone was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was like being rinsed out, like the hull of a boat having its barnacles rubbed off by being beached on the sand. I could feel myself becoming transparent, and there wasn't much need to interact with many people. I needed silence and time and distance, and I got them.

As a result, I'm feeling more samantha-colored than I have in ages. Just because my extremities don't feel like natural disasters doesn't mean that they aren't, of course, but I'm a little better prepared to deal with that. I'm not better, but I'm good, and I think that I'm aligned to heal properly. Which is good, because it's spring, and I've got a lot of outdoor drinking to do, a lot of new friends to make. Now that I can breathe a little again.

love,
me