Good night, dear. Good night.

 I have been crying non-stop for two days now. I wonder where my tears come from. I wonder how I can be hurt like this—it isn’t humane. It isn’t humane for anyone to be in this much pain, yet I’m here. I’m here and that hurts so much. It hurts so much that I can’t stress it enough. I’ve been hurting so much for myself to realize that words undervalue everything. I’ve kept thinking about how much of it is felt, how much of it is heard when I say every night seems like the last. Each lonely passing night is a torturous quest to reach another day. I wonder how people do it, life. I take a look at everyone and can’t help but go on and on questioning how they can do life that way and I’m here. And I’m here and I stay awake, eyes and mind wide open, hurting so terribly, crying endlessly. How can I ever get out of this prison. In a state of being human as cruel and excruciating as this, it’s almost impossible not to feel alone. 

In one of my sessions with my psychiatrist where I sob more than I speak sensibly, which, on that note, I think I have never spoken with much sense, she told me to try giving myself gentle pats, rub my chest, and try extending comforting hugs to myself. In that same session, we tried doing such things. I hugged myself. I rubbed my chest because, at that same moment, I broke down in full-blown, unconsolable mode. Despite the number of times I’ve sat vis-à-vis the doctors who patiently wait for me to have enough courage to answer a question in between sobs, I have always felt more secluded, more frustrated over the fact that, again, words undervalue everything. Words can never be enough. There are roughly one million words in the English language alone, yet no amount of them is ever enough to adequately express how I am feeling.

In a 1975 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, a line said, "Words are flaccid." Words are flaccid. They are. More often than not, I feel that it’s a futile attempt to try to express myself. I’ve never come to a point where I thought I communicated how I felt in the clearest of ways. It makes me feel much more hopeless. How far can "goodbye" go? Or, "I love you." Or, "I think I can’t make it out of this night alive." Or, "It’s torture every day." How far can they go? How long can they make someone feel my pain, care until they don’t, and be here until they leave? Does it last a second? A couple of quiet, clueless minutes? An hour until they fall asleep? I’ve been yearning for solicitude without an expiration date. But somehow, it only lasts until it doesn’t anymore. Sooner or later, they will all have to leave. Sooner or later, I will be the one to leave. 

People say every one of us has a place in this world. If that is true, mine’s definitely not to be found here. I don’t know where it is, or if I will ever find it and feel for once that I belong, but it’s not here. I hope when I disappear, it will feel like I have found my place. Like going home. Going home. I’ve remained long enough for my bones to be restless. I’ve stayed long enough to go insane over wanting to escape from my own flesh. I’ve stayed awake long enough to try running away and ended up still having myself with me.

I’ve cried so awfully much to learn that my tears leave hard-to-erase stains on my eyeglasses. I’ve cried incessantly to taste my coffee with tears that have dripped down my lips. I’ve cried like a faucet that’s been forgotten to be closed to realize that it causes a flood, and I couldn’t save myself. And I drown. And I search for air with shaky hands. And I look for something, for someone, and nothing’s here, and no one’s here. And I dial the suicide hotline once again, for the hundredth time, wanting to hear someone else’s voice. And I sob and I try to utter the word "help" while I am told to calm down, to breathe, but it hurts to breathe. It hurts to hug myself. It hurts to be stabbed in the heart by the fact that I’m alone. And I’m lonely. And I’m so fucking lonely I think it would kill me. And I’m so fucking lonely it makes my heart hurt. And, darling, I used to believe that a broken heart was only a metaphor for poems and stories, but now, dear, hear me out, I can feel my heart breaking. I can feel my heart melting like a burned candle. I can feel my heart collapsing like an ancient building. Losing color like a worn-out shirt. Losing light like a lonely, sunken city engulfed in a blackout. I can feel it shatter into a million sharp pieces. I can hear my heart screaming and I scream back and my heart and I could be screaming in insanity at once and nobody could ever hear anything. And I sit down on a cold, rusting metal bench in an almost empty village known for having ghosts, crippled by the crisp wind, crippled by indescribable pain, crippled by loneliness. And I sit and sob and reach my hands out, but to whom? To whom? Who will come to save me? Who and what will ever be capable of saving me? But then, I wait still. I wait and wait and wait until another day comes, and it’s time to go back, under my sad blanket, beside my blue cutter. It’s time to take medicine, go to sleep if life gives me a bit of mercy to fall asleep, and then wake up and do it all over again. Listening to the same songs, writing the same things that result in farewell letters, the exact same desperate, hopeless things. I’m buried alive in devastation.

Maybe all these words don’t make sense. Maybe this is another way of proving that expressing one’s self always ends up in vain, in forlorn silence, in loneliness and isolation. It’s blaring and it’s quiet and I’m spiraling down into a black hole and I don’t want to feel invisible nor suffocated by my lack of worth and my lack of all beautiful things, but I feel it. And I sob. I sob into the careless night. I sob with the swaying of the tree branches. As fallen leaves fly, as rocks stay hard on the ground, as beer bottles go crashing onto the walls. I sob into the wind. I sob and sob and sob and I’m tired and it won’t stop and I have no strength left.

My heart feels like it’s carrying the entire universe. I’m about to explode. I’m a sobbing bomb. I’m a miserable, hopeless, sobbing bomb. So, I’ll be away because it’s not kind to explode around everybody. So, I say I’m wishing you happiness, genuinely, and I hope life treats you well and you, in return, treat your life well. I hope you find where you belong. I hope you won’t have to think and feel that cutting the flow of your existence is your only way out, and that disappearing is the path to going home. So, I will smile at your face one last time. So, I will tell you I love you. So I stand up from the doleful bench and slowly make my way to the exit door. And my heart throbs, and my head throbs, and everything in me throbs. And I reach out, one last time. And so long, I say goodbye.