to want and to wait
some sort of confession
There are mornings I can’t look in my bedroom mirror. The thought of catching a glimpse of myself, of being faced with a body that is so foreign to me that we feel like strangers, makes my heart stop. I have considered covering the mirror entirely, but I don’t want to answer questions, and some days I am vain. It feels like if I accidentally meet my own eyes in the glass I’ll have lost and my life will be over in some small way. It feels like I’ll petrify myself. I can’t stand to know that this is what people see when they look at me. I am haunted by the fact that anyone can see me at all. Yesterday, on the train, a woman stared at me for so long I wondered what it was she was seeing. I tried to tell myself I was transparent and she saw right through me, and that her intent gaze was for the person behind me. I am genuinely grieved to know that even at my worst I am corporeal, opaque, full of flesh. I am disgusted at my own existence and embarrassed at my disgust. Can you smell it on me? In my head, I ask this to the passersby. In my head, they tell me they don’t care enough about me to notice my scent.
I sat at dinner with my family and thought—with one part horror and another indifference—that I don’t know if this is just what love is supposed to feel like (the same as everything else, a feeling situated between comfort and on the cusp of fear), but I don’t feel much of anything for anyone. I have never been the most liked and believe I never will be, so, at some hazy point in time, I started not liking at all. I used to see people as lifelines, but people were never going to save me. I don’t think I was ever going to save them, either. It’s much easier to live with very little of others in my mind, even though that leaves a colossal amount of space for hatred–particularly toward myself. I am someone who cannot stand to be around others or around herself, so I am perpetually uneasy. This constant discomfort translates itself into everything; I imagine myself getting hit by a car and never walking again, of holding the frayed ends of my life together and looking up at the sky and asking myself and God if it is my destiny to stagnate and wish someone loved me enough to make me love myself. I fantasize about meeting people who never think of me ten years from now when it doesn’t hurt anymore and showing them my teeth and looking straight through them like it never mattered to me. My low self-esteem comes in part from what people told me in my most formative years, and also from a mistake I made some years ago. In the throes of early teenagehood, I told myself I was evil. The only person you ever really believe is yourself, and, ironically enough, I believed myself so earnestly that I can’t bring myself to believe otherwise. I, inadequate and unlikable, gave myself a big reason to wage war on myself, and it added itself onto every other tiny, previously forgivable, reason. Now, it is easier to hate myself than to hate anyone else, and it is hard to like anyone in general. This is a fact I am entirely, painfully aware of, but unable to change. I think a part of me finds comfort in sadness because it is the only thing that is absolutely true in my mind. Happiness feels like a trick, like a rabbit snare. I am running and I think I am careful, but I am inevitably caught by misery again.
There is something wrong with this life. Between all the pockets of gratitude sit envy and loathing, all of it immeasurable. Everything is colored with fear and my stomach always hurts. I feel it in the mornings, this unrelenting and inevitable doom, wake up to it like one might a husband she hates. It’s always with me, even when we’re apart. If I leave it at the door when I leave the house, it slips a note into my backpack. If I shove it in my locker when I get to school, I can hear its faint banging through the halls all day. I’m waiting for something, but I can’t bring myself to move and I’m keeping the object of my desire a secret from myself. I imagine myself as the main character in a television show—specifically the ones where a woman who feels terribly alone leaves her life behind and meets people who change her life. It’s a small-town summer, and she has someone who waits for her at the bus stop. Someone to wait for. In my head, I am her. In reality, I have nothing to look forward to and no one to meet. I walk off the train smelling like someone’s cigarette and am too afraid to talk to strangers and am entirely convinced that I will not live past twenty-five. I need someone to call, phone-to-ear, to talk with for hours without a video screen and a pair of headphones. I want to walk through the city with someone I like in my ear, to talk about anything. I don’t think, though, that there is anyone in this world who will ever be that for me. I can’t imagine anyone being curious enough about me to look at me and wonder what I’m thinking and why I look so miserable and to want to live in my arms and make me less miserable. I don’t want to be held, and I don’t want to be seen; I don’t want to be unravelled. A few weeks ago, I thought to myself, Maybe I write about people loving each other ugly so I can pretend I am not terrified of anyone unearthing my monstrosity. I think of that often, then ask myself if I really am so monstrous and come to the conclusion that being loved would probably curdle me like milk. It would give me an excuse to really bare it all, and I don’t think I am someone who should ever be bare. The thought of never finding love used to terrify me, but over the past few weeks I’ve found it doesn’t really bother me anymore. This may change once I am happy again.
I don’t know how to end this. It is an amalgamation of scattered thoughts I’ve jotted down in my journal and notes app, and there is no real conclusion to scatter. I don’t know if I know how to love, I dream of someone to call and wait for but I am afraid of being waited for by anyone, and I find it hard to see myself. These are my current truths; I hope most of them will change.
Thank you for reading. I hope you’re well <3
— Fatou
this is profoundly beautiful and so sad - I feel the urge to be the one you can call. how sad that we are strangers.
two quotes I think about all the time:
“Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.” - Milan Kundera, Immortality
“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face--there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
you are an incredible writer, I can feel the hurt and yearning through your words and it’s really beautiful. thank you 🫶
Ohhh wow this is gut wrenching yet undeniably real … the last part especially about not being the type of person that should be laid bare … yeah that shit hit hard !!! This is such an honest piece of work that doesn’t sugarcoat anything, doesn’t pepper itself with too much imagery (not that there’s anything wrong w that!), and forces us to look the narrator’s desires and even fears (or lack of them) in the face even if they might seem unsightly or unspeakable … What a beautiful piece of work. I don’t think it’s monstrous to ache to be loved. I think it’s human