An Ache for Something More
You asked me if I could see the art in the city streets. I told you all I saw was buildings. You turned away from me, squinted your eyes and sighed. Then you took my hand and told me to squint mine. You said, “See how all the buildings blur together, no longer defined by structure, the colors paint life. It’s sad but beautiful.” You called a lot of things sad but beautiful, as if there was no way to separate the two.
Despite my effort, life didn’t become something else when I looked at it from a different perspective. The city was just the city out of focus. But I didn’t want to leave you stranded in your feelings so I told you I could see something of the sort. I’m not sure you believed me but I think you appreciated the effort.
I remember how much it scared me to hear you talk about the world when we first met. Everything you described sounded so immense. My world had always felt carefully contained. My world was a life plan, where my eyes stayed glued to the pavement two feet in front of me and even when I looked up I only saw the next place I needed to be. But you saw it all. You felt it all, each path every individual took colliding against each other as they worked through the chaos. And I saw the toll it took on you, the weariness in your eyes and the tears. But the more time I spent with you the more I realized, you never wished to feel less. Because you knew these feelings mattered and feeling them made you matter. Your life was like art, meaningful because of the struggle.
The longer I spent with you the more I longed to see the world through your eyes. Sometimes we would walk down a street and you’d smile at the way the sun hit the windows of an apartment complex, and then your eyes would water from something unspoken. You were never good at keeping your emotions separate from each other. I, on the other hand, had each moment categorized by an easily defined feeling. The beach is happy. Goodbyes are sad. Errands are tiring. But with you everything blurred together like the city. The beach is calming because of the lull of the waves but sad because of its power and lack of empathy but scary because of its immensity. Goodbyes are sad because of their finality but happy because of hope for new opportunities but sweet because of resurfacing memories. Errands are stressful because there are always more to be done but joy-filled because of the smiles from strangers all struggling through a day together.
Your feelings were contradictory at best. But they contained a depth I yearned for. My life felt dull in comparison, just a movie playing out in front of my eyes. I saw the scenes and felt the emotions in time but I didn’t feel like a participant in its design. I wanted to be immersed in your world. I would beg you to describe the sky to me whenever we sat in the grass together. In my bed, one night, I asked you to relive the sunlight. You described the details of the sun’s light ghosting over your skin so vividly I could almost feel it in the darkness of my apartment.
My eagerness to hear more grew with each passing day. It turned into an obsession of sort. But the more I reached for it the more I lost clarity. Anxiety began to wrap around my throat as questions screamed through my mind. What exactly was my life defined by? I was losing a sense of sanity in my search for reality. And my anxiety just seemed to tighten its hold, pressing down on my wind pipes as my thoughts spiraled. Everything was spinning through my mind but I didn’t have the strength to reach out and grasp something solid. I just continued to sink into myself.
The next time we spoke you could see that the anxiety had seeped through my skin into my blood stream. Stuck somewhere between fight or flight, I was an animal beating against its cage but you took my hand, gently cupping it in your two soft ones. You looked at it carefully as you tenderly stroked it with your thumb in a calming repetition. You were trying to ground me. We stood there for a while, listening to your steady breath. You didn’t speak until my breath matched yours. Then you looked up and said, “You’re never going to see the world like I do. We are all trapped in our own way of being but take comfort in the fact that I can also never understand the intricacies of colors through your eyes. The reason pain and beauty go together is because they are experienced alone. And no words will ever be able to sum up the feelings they impart in you. So take comfort in the pain just like you take comfort in the beauty. Look at how much pain you have been experiencing. See, you are just as alive as I.”
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Short story by Nicole Asherah. Nicole Asherah is an artist who tries to connect people to intimate moments, feelings, and relationships experienced throughout life through her poetry, paintings, and photography.
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