Melodramatic melancholy
March 2004

Why does my heart hurt?  Why have my eyes lost all their meaning, and are now empty and flat?  Why is there no word for this ache?  Why do I have no explanation for my pain?
            When I looked in the mirror last night it was a barbed dagger to see the lusterless color of my eyes.  Maybe it’s just a small instance of kaloskagathia, the dead feeling inside showing in my appearance.  But whatever the reason, I hate the change.  I hate this feeling, a mixture of apathy and sorrow.  Something inside me is sobbing, wailing, begging me to let the tears overflow.  Let the tears spill out of those eyes and bring them back to life.  Let some emotion show, let this fierce sadness leave my heart and come out as anger or frustration or helplessness or tears—anything, anything, not this vapid silence.

Where are all my feelings?  Why can I feel nothing except this ache that is at the same time dull and poignant?  No matter what happens I’m hollow—no, not hollow, for that implies a lightness contrary to the sinking weight of my heart.
            Why do our emotions reside in the heart?  Is it just something we’re conditioned to, so that’s where we expect to feel things?  Watch a sad movie, and it hits you right there.  Or listen to a beautiful piece of music and your heart soars.  Is that true, or just a way of expressing what we feel?

            Words are brilliant.  English has so many thousands of words with subtle differences in meaning, and yet language is still so inadequate.  How could you ever find words to express the joy of a mother holding her baby for the first time, or the sorrow of watching a loved one suffer?  How can you describe a sunset over the ocean or a rose in bloom?  How can you tell someone about the ache in your heart that won’t leave, when you don’t even know why it’s there?  Picking and choosing words, placing them side by side incoherently, is the best I can do.  Hollow but full of sorrow.  Apathetic but agonizingly passionate.  The contradictory terms are the closest I come to describing the feelings inside—though even this is untrue, since part of me is numb.  Is personal experience the only way of knowing what that heartache feels like?  Can I explain it to someone who has never had this sadness?
            Do you get close enough to a person that you can convey what’s in your heart despite the shortcomings of English?  How do they understand what you mean to say?  Is it just the Crow saying, “We know each other’s heart”?  How do you communicate without words, without speaking verbally but speaking directly from one heart to another?  How long does it take to get to that point?  Can any two people do that, or do you have to be “kindred spirits”?  Could you sit down with someone and pour out your soul and they’d know what you were talking about, even if you had just met them?  Why do some people seem to instantly connect like that?
            When will I find another person I can connect with?  I need away, I need something new, I need someone new.  Did my friends stop being able to understand what my heart was feeling, or did I stop being able to tell them?  Of course Ryan still knows.  If I can manage to find a starting place, Ryan can always understand.  But it won’t last forever, and I’m wishing for another person to listen to my heart.
            Or am I?  Would I rather be alone, enjoying the solitude and the silence?  Do I actually want to tell someone how I feel?
            Yes.  I desperately want to, because maybe as I search for the right words, the tears will come.  And I can have emotion again, I can look in the mirror and see life in my eyes.

I hate having walls all around.  If I had my choice I’d be in the middle of a field, lying on my stomach.  Thinking.  Thinking.  Thinking about every possible joy or hurt I’ve known until one of them finally makes me feel something.  But I can’t stand being inside.  I can’t stand being with people.  People who laugh and smile and cry and feel.  Let me get away, let me escape, let me by myself.  Alone with my memories and thoughts, and eventually the walls around my heart will be gone and I can cry.  I can let everything go, I can finally have emotion in my eyes, I can be alive again.  I can cry myself to sleep instead of lying in bed for three hours with my eyes open, vacant.