The light’s red. Why won’t it turn? I’m impatient. The light is my day, long, arduous and dragged out. I hear noises, the putter of the bike in front of me, spitting heat into my eyes, unbeknownst to it’s driver, still rude.
They’re everywhere, surrounding me on all sides. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t even feel. I’m numb. My hand involuntarily waits to pull back the throttle. I barely even feel it anymore. I’m automated from the moment I finish work. I want to unwind from the whistling in my head that won’t let me find silence.
I growl and I spit at the kind words drifting from behind me, held tight, wrapped in concern, from someone who cares for me. I feel shame and anger, but I don’t get it? I can’t reflect, I can’t think.
There’s no quiet, but it’s not loud?
We’re moving slowly. She clenches every time someone drives too close. We shout over the sounds every now and again “How was your day?”, “Were your classes okay?”
It takes a lot of focus to hear through the noise, but I look forward to this everyday. It’s little and meaningless, but it holds care and concern. It’s something small that shows that it doesn’t matter what the answer is, it’s the questions that mean something.
But my head is scratching and all I want to do is bite. I’m tired, moving into quiet. I just want to desensitize. I want to put down today’s load, overburdened and over-sensed. Let me just untangle the day.
But I can’t, the world wants me, grabbing at me with every god damn colorful shade of useless it can attract my eyes with. It takes and it takes, and we don’t even realize what’s going on. We can’t hear because we’re giving what we don’t know we have.
I wish you knew, all of you. This electricity you feel scratching through your head, you’re not alone. I know how it feels, trust me. It’s that uncomfortable humidity driven itch, drifting along that slow falling sweat drop at the back of your neck, wrapped into those everyday moments. It’s like you’re in a room just below the AC where you know it should be cold but it just keeps swinging above you hot, uncomfortable and just out of reach. I know that feeling, I truly do.
That uncomfortable itch we get from time to time without warning, you need to accept that it happens. Accept that you may snarl, bite and growl.
Accept that sometimes we all just need to be alone.
Accept that it’s okay to feel this way. Accept that you don’t have to understand why you feel this way.
But most importantly accept that it’s okay to feel.
I just.
I just find that I feel ashamed at how I can snap or go quiet sometimes when I get this way, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.
I guess I just want others to know that I don’t need you to understand sometimes.
Sometimes I just need to feel. And even though I can be hard to be around sometimes, I’m still there with you.
We’re all still there.
We all still care.
Milkshake Thoughts 