I can't take my own advice

“IT TAKES EVERYTHING IN ME NOT TO CALL YOU, AND I WISH I COULD RUN TO YOU, AND I HOPE YOU KNOW THAT EVERY TIME I DON’T, I ALMOST DO.”

I want to call the hell out of you. I wanna scream those lyrics at the top of my lungs. I wanna punch my pillow. And cry. And be able to take my goddamn exams without checking my phone for your stupid name every three seconds. I want to scroll through Pinterest without crying at the next “excerpt from a book I’ll never write.” I wanna read our texts again, for the ninth time today. I wanna look at my pictures with you. 

God dammit. Damn all of this. I wish I could take all of this and just crumple it up into a ball and Kobe throw it into the trash. I hate needing you like this. Some days, I am totally, one hundred percent hunky dory, good-as-can-be, myself. Other days, I’m consumed — no — being swallowed whole by this whole “change” thing. It’s sucks okay?? Did anybody ever tell you that?

"How did we get here

And how do we get back

Wish I could do it all again

We were just kids then

Doing our best when

All of the rest got in the way

I miss my best friend

Drunk at the dead end

All of our stress would melt away

How did we get here

And how do we get back?”

Did you know every song in the world was written about this time in my life? Did you? Because they were. And I want to simultaneously listen to them and never listen to them again. Isn’t it crazy that your life crashed into mine and took me miles away from myself and now you’re gone, and I’m gone, and we’re both just..lost as hell. If I didn’t say it enough before, this. Sucks.

I want to call the hell out of you. Because through all this anxiety, and worry, and sadness, and anger, and patience, and loneliness, and every other feeling under the sun, it is only you that will make this feel right again. Even though you caused every last one in the first place. I have talked so many of my friends through stuff like this. Through the push and pull of needing someone. Through changes they did or didn’t want. I was there, I knew what to say. And they’re good. They made it through unscathed, slightly more fragile but 30x more beautiful and I cheered for them through the whole damn thing and look at me?

Some days I take gigantic, astronaut on the moon sized steps forward in this process of healing. Other days I am stuck in quicksand mixed with glue mixed with bricks mixed with 6 pianos tied to my waist. It’s deeply, truly exhausting to fight with your mind every day, waking up to wonder what the progress means today and if the steps we made yesterday even exist today at all. 

There is no step-by-step solution to this. There’s no cure to this hurting. There is no speeding up time. All there is is calling my family. And hanging out with my best friends. There’s Netflix to drown out the white noise in my room and music to drown out the white noise in my head. There’s tea in the morning. And at night. There’s tiny little beautiful moments that make the hard moments bearable. 

I don’t know. Honestly. I can’t say for certain that any of that works. Hell, I wrote a whole story about letting go and I can’t seem to do it myself. But I have to keep telling myself: this is going to get better. This hurt inside will one day will feel so much lighter, and this waking up in the morning with this ache in my chest will go away. I’ll be able to sleep again. 

If YOU’re reading this, I hope you’re happy. I hope you realize your impact on the lives you’ve touched, and the effect that your actions have on you and everyone you know. I hope you know you will never get back what you threw away. And I hope you find peace in that. I hope you find happiness the way you had it before. I hope you fill the bottomless void too.

I want to call the hell out of you. I want to go back and do it again, and again, and again. But I won’t. And I can’t. And that, for now, is enough.