a journal entry by Haider
art by Fiza Mohsin
There isn’t a word for the exhaustion one feels when one's too young to be feeling so old. It’s almost as if you have lived every life, experienced every feeling, every moment of joy and bliss, despair and misery, and everything you feel now is going to be just little pints of it. Amid an era where everything is commercialized - where you are supposed to be moving out by the time you graduate high school, graduating college in your early twenties, getting married by your mid-twenties, and paying off all your debts and loans by the time you’re thirty - you lose a sense of self and have no way of figuring out what it is that you want , or worse, who you want to be. Where should you even start?
It feels awful to not play your life according to tradition or trend; it is almost as if you are not participating in society. It births the fear of being “forgotten,” or being “unknown.” There was a time where I believed that I must upload a picture of myself and my writing sometime soon on my social media accounts, or else I would be forgotten. I feared that for whatever reason, people would not have any idea as to who I was, or what I did while I was still here. They would have no place to write “rest in peace,” if I were to die anytime soon. They would have nothing to say about me or remember me by. So, I went on to post a picture of myself, and then slowly, posting pieces of my writing — leaving enough words to be heard and to be remembered by.
Looking back at it, I am amazed that I let myself fall into that headspace. But then again, I am not surprised that I did. I still have that fear running around my head. Therefore, I figured, “Let me be forgotten. Let my words evaporate off of paper, and for the ink to dry off. Who cares?”
I don’t know if I will ever figure it out. I don’t know who will or whoever has. Perhaps my life is one big attempt to understand things. To get closer to something I will never feel. But if I must die in my attempts, then I must attempt. I don’t know where I am headed, but I am embracing oblivion. I am embracing my place in limbo.
A depressed horse once said, “in this terrifying world, all we have are the connections we make”. I would like to hold on to that advice. It feels nice to have someone share the same anxiety with you. It doesn’t feel like anxiety when you have someone to share it with. All the good things in life are best shared; love and happiness. Why must it not apply to the bad ones too?
I am not too sure about where I am headed with all this, and I was never sure of it when I began this. But sometimes, for whatever unknown reason, it feels good to have someone else swim with you. But I wouldn’t know that. I have always been afraid of swimming. The first time I stepped into a pool, I immediately drowned and have had a fear of it ever since. But perhaps, if we hold hands, we could find a way to float.
We dream of our place between the stars and the moon, not knowing how wonderful it all can seem from down here if we just take a moment to look. In a moment of time where everything is best lived if escaped from, I hope one day, we find a place not too far away, where all attempts to escape happen to cease.