Listen to: Ludovico Einaudi’s Ritornare

Dear X,

For the five years we’ve known each other, you’ve grown closer to me than an arm’s length. An arm’s length, that is how far we were from one another. You were the gasp that took my breath away. I inhaled your breath till the end and grew fond of that mojito-kent scent it reeked of.

You wouldn’t recognize me now. I’ve changed. Not in the ways you and I once dreamed of, but towards the other side of the moon. My eyebrows are much darker, and my skin still burns under the sun. I still get racist comments about how disgustingly pale my skin is and feedback on the best tan salons in town. Since you’ve been gone, no one tells my skin reminds them of childhood cartoon shows and Disney fairytales.

I am burning. Both on a physical skin-tone level and an internal psychological one. I am also afraid of myself and how deteriorated my state of mind has become. I tell myself that 27 is a good age to die. Not now. That is how I hold on. I don’t mean to sound ridiculous or immature. I’m not suicidal either. I have enough to blithe about. I can’t seem to control that part of my thinking. I won’t do anything crazy; I’m too lazy to even open my bedroom lights.

I’m just tired of me.

I’m trying to be outside of that box everyone refers to. Starting next month, I’m leaving. Both physically and mentally. I need a permanent distraction. I don’t know if this is a temporary phase people go through when they’re twenty. I hope it is. I feel stuck. There are no walls around me but air itself seems to be closing in on me. I keep thinking I don’t want tomorrow to come, I want to go back. I want to undo and redo everything. I want to un-meet my first boyfriend. I want to un-shred my old diaries. I want to, um, do a lot of things I held back on. But mostly I want to reconstruct my past. I won’t tell you why; I don’t know the reason myself. It’s all that I think of, aside from everything that I think of.

Maybe once that’s fixed and I come back here, to ground zero, I would then find that there is no other cause of my misery than myself. I can’t come to peace with that yet. Deep down I know it very well. It is all up to me, but I can’t face that.

Retracing my past is a farfetched dream I can’t afford to hold on to. I am hoping that this radical change I am undergoing would do the trick. Or at least, it would be a breather. Moving out, quitting all my jobs, and changing. That is my plan for this summer. My next step would be to leave and never look back. But it’s too soon to reveal all my cards now. I’ll tell you about that later.

Yours, 

N. 

9:24 p.m.

Sunday, May 19, 2013.