emotional range of a bathtub
in which we feel, endlessly.
Having the emotional range of a bathtub is mostly exhausting and inconvenient.
The issue is that emotions are not cute coloured-in labels that stick and peel away linearly; they’re layered and sudden and disastrous. And they don’t come alone; they come with a bandwagon of thoughts that are utterly uninvited yet so compelling that you can’t quite shake them off. So in honour of this season of endings and beginnings and conversations that I’ll cherish in my deepest heart, I celebrate these unnamed emotions:
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Nostalgia, except it’s for today. The very premise of being nostalgic is the quality of yearning for something buried so far back in time, so how can one be homesick for the present? How can one yearn to relive the moment that just passed by and to taste it afresh, experiencing all its pulls and tugs with an intact naivety?
To grow and to change. That constant tension between wanting to live different days in different ways and yet not wanting to lose the here and the now. Wanting to meet new people without wanting to loosen my grasp on what my people have created in this life. Wanting to enlarge those spaces without ever relinquishing these.
Carpe diem, except it’s not just today. I want to seize the day, but I can’t help pausing to think of the syntax this day will become. The syntax that will write the story of how we were as the sun set on our untouched dreams. How this reaching to grasp every moment between my hands will eventually be vanquished by time, cooling to a pressed smile between warm pages.
It’s the season of endings and beginnings. The air bears growing pains, and I breathe it in as it breezes on by, as if we were never there.
