Afterglow

It's always been hard for me to write on the first page of a notebook. There's this need to fill it with the right words, to put my name on that page like it means something. My youth was that notebook to me. I'm not young anymore, not really, but I'm still filling it, and I'm still scared every single time I turn to a new blank page.

Ten years ago I was sixteen. That's the year I found out I had something called a heart, felt it actually beating, felt it want things and break when it didn't get them. I used to cry over anything back then, I mean anything, but I never let anyone see it. I believed in myself more than I believed I'd still be breathing the next moment, and I didn't even notice I was already breathing fine the whole time. I thought I was going to be immortal. Invincible. Undefeatable. Maybe I was Iron Man? I think for a while I actually believed I was Iron Man.

Anyway, All that rage and pride and dreams with no ceiling, all my emotions running at full volume, it made me think I was better than everyone else. But it was also the time I shone the brightest in my whole life, completely on my own, with no one's help. And it was the loneliest I've ever been. Ten years later, both of those are still true. Neither one has changed.

I started writing letters when I was ten, before I even knew what I was doing it for. By sixteen it had turned into journals, pages I filled just to survive whatever year I was in. It wasn't until 2021 that I wrote for a magazine for the first time, and somewhere after that, writing stopped being something I did in private and became something I did for other people to read. But before there were essays and pitches and articles, there were letters, the kind I wrote to people I loved, telling them everything I found beautiful about them, how much better my life was for having them in it. I don't know if I'd have written a single one of those if I'd known some of them would end up being the last thing I had left of that person. Now I look at those pages and I genuinely can't tell you if they're just paper and words, or if they're pieces of me that were left with the people who took them.

My mother never said the words. She never really showed it the way I wanted her to, and most of the time it felt like some part of her wanted a different child than me, one more like my brother. But looking back now, I think she probably did love me, just in her own way, somewhere in between all those years, in ways I was too young to read at the time. I loved her anyway, the whole time, without waiting for her to say it back.

When she fell sick, I understood almost immediately what it would cost. Somewhere in the middle of watching her get smaller, I quietly let go of the one thing I had wanted for myself since I was a kid. Nobody asked me to. I just knew, the way you know things about your own family without being told, and I decided I'd rather let it go on my own terms than watch it get taken from me later. It felt like the first real thing I ever cut off myself, on purpose, before it had the chance to hurt me the way everything else eventually did.

After that, protecting her became the only reason I could point to for staying alive at all. Everyone and everything that reached her had to pass through me first, as if I could stand between her and the whole world if I just tried hard enough. I never complained, not even when she hurt me, not even on the days I was falling apart myself. I just kept standing in front of her. I didn't notice, until much later, that I had spent every part of myself doing it, and there wasn't a single piece left over that still belonged to me.

She died anyway. Three months after her, I lost my father too. Loving him had never been simple, but somehow I still did, and somehow losing him still broke something in me all over again. I slipped into a depression I'm still finding my way out of, some days better than others. Around that time I also started a blog, one where I wrote about strangers I passed on the street, the ordinary people nobody usually stops to notice. I called it Through My Eyes. I think I needed to look outward at other people's stories because I couldn't yet look directly at my own. I let go of my best friend too, not because she left, but because I was already so good at letting people go that I let her go first, while I was still drowning and didn't know how to let anyone stand that close to me. And the person I loved, the one I'd had feelings for since I was thirteen, I only recently walked away from, because I noticed I had let all of myself become about him, shaped by him, affected by him, and I didn't want to disappear into someone again the way I'd already disappeared into my mother.

My mother. My father. My dream. My best friend. The love of my life. Myself, the version of me that existed before all of this. I've let go of every single one of them, and most of the time, I was the one who did the letting go. If someone asked me to describe my youth in one sentence, that's it. Letting go.

There's a version of this that I've heard people say. That youth can take your money, or your dreams, or your family, and sometimes it takes all three from you at once, without asking. I don't need someone else's words for that though. I know it firsthand. I watched it happen to me, one after another, until there wasn't much left standing.

I don't want to give you false hope here. Things started falling apart in my life when I was sixteen. I'm twenty six now. Not a lot has actually changed since then, if I'm being honest with you. The heartbreaks, the tears, the failures, you take all of that to your grave with you. But the love you gave and got, the dreams you dreamed, the smiles you actually smiled, those come with you too, all the way to the end.

I had bad years when I was young and completely alone, and back then it felt like it was never going to end. But those years are also what taught me how to love people right, taught me that loving someone sometimes means learning their language and forgetting a bit of your own. And eventually, they taught me how to love myself too.

That love came late though. Later than I would've liked. At one point in my youth I had people die on me, and it got bad enough that I considered choosing death myself. What pulled me back, honestly, was the love I had for myself, even back then, even when I didn't think I had any left.

So if you ask me now, at an age where nobody's calling me young anymore, what my youth actually gave me, this is what I'd say. That was then. I know what I like now. And more than that, I know what I don't.

To my youth, someday I hope we meet again. I'll tell you all the stories I made after you. You remind me of the ones I've already forgotten.

And to anyone still in their youth right now, or anyone who's already made it out the other side like me, it's okay. This is both of our first time being a person. So we forgive ourselves, together, when we get it wrong.