Dear Love

how is it that I’m a stranger to my own heart?

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I go on YouTube and watch music videos from decades ago. I look at the oversaturated, ridiculously high grainy contrast and laugh to myself. I soak in the beauty of the blinding art and for a while, I’m a spectator to my life. I let the music fill the air as I look at my life from a third person’s point of view. And it’s nothing special. Just your average college student with too much to say and no voice.

I click on share even though I don’t really have a friend who’d appreciate it at 2 am and save the link to my notes app.

I’m happy. I want to feel like this forever. I write, disillusioned by the quiet of the night. I write of dreams and desires only good art can evoke.

Come morning, I barely remember it. I’m back to my monotonic idiotic self that feeds off of to-do lists and sleeps to timers. When I see questions asking me where I want to be in five years or my plans after college, I think about life and what I’ve done so far.

And the answer isn’t shocking or heartbreaking. I’ve done nothing. And I feel as monotonic saying it as I feel living it.

I’ve done nothing, I tell myself. I fall in love with words and music all the time. But I haven’t really been drunk in love. You know, the kind that lends reason to the random, beauty to the weird and purpose to the lost. I haven’t written anything good enough to be cherished by strangers. I haven’t created anything or come up with anything that makes a real difference.

And no one gets this agonising emptiness I try so hard to convey with my words, with my mannerisms and my utter lack to indulge society.

You’re still young. You still have your whole life ahead of you. You’re still in college. But how can it be that I’m this old and I still don’t know myself? How is it that I’m a stranger to my own heart?

I see Freddie Mercury singing his heart out. I scroll through Van Gogh’s paintings. I read about Jonathan Larson. I watch Bob Ross paint. And every single time, all I see is their unfiltered, sheer, mercifully raging love for the world and what they do.

I want that, I think. But it’s all delusions of the youth. At the end of the day, I simply have nothing to offer. I see the originality and beauty and excitement of the most mundane around me but none of it is from me. I write about strangers because I have nothing to write about myself. I write about letting go because I’ve never had to hold on.

And I think that’s it. I’m trying to find meaning and reason in everything. I’m trying to find purpose when one hasn’t taken form yet. I’m searching for what I love when I have never truly fallen in love. And it’s all over the place - such messy chaos suffocating from all these thoughts and questions I need answers to when I rarely work for or towards them because I’m too fixated on moulding the perfect future.

Some days, I stay up till 2 am listening to music and watching old music videos hoping some of that raw art will assimilate into my sight and diffuse across my senses and I’ll finally see the world the way they did.

Maybe I’ll finally love life like they did. Simply, honestly and dearly.

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