Boxes

You know when you wake up, one eye open one eye closed, in urgent need of coffee, half stuck in the dreams reign until reality fully hits you. Somedays it is good, you feel grateful, you enjoy that first sip of coffee and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can make your day go wrong. Then there are the other kinds of days, where you would rather stay in bed curled up in your own misery. These suck. You tell yourself “this is shit” and while you would need to pinpoint the root of the issue to solve it, you just can’t because it seems that everything is going wrong. A love that only pictures will remember, that friendship that only looks good on social media, everybody else’s expectations but your own, the anger that you can’t get yourself to understand and then there is you. While you is grown, while you is changed, you is wrong because it seems to only hold on to all the bullshit mentioned above. This was my 2017.

 

A year so different to any other it has swept me off my feet, sometimes up in the air, sometimes down on the floor. It concluded with Mom moving to a new apartment and leaving behind the one we grew up in. It was a bittersweet metaphor that perfectly described where I was standing in life because truly, it feels like the one that has moved in 2017 is me. Surrounded by chaos with the need to put things back in order, to close certain chapters of my life, to prep to write new ones. The idea of moving is romantic, it’s the physical representation of starting over, a fresh canvas to fill with new furniture, to learn your way through a different set-up and to merge old habits and new habits together. However, everything that precedes that moment is nothing but hectic. The bad kind of messes, the one that mixes sadness and excitement, memories and reality, who you are and who you used to be. There are birthday cards written by people that are gone, folded pictures on the marble floor, the sweater I wore when we first kissed, the necklace I never liked but just kept out of love, party echoes coming from the living room, the BFF resolutions we failed to keep. It’s all over the place and the more you try to organize the more chaos you get. There are boxes, boxes for everything. Things you want to keep, things you want to throw, things that still remain a giant question mark. Your heart is heavy to the idea of throwing anything but you know can’t keep it all because you’ve reached that point in life when the boxes become so heavy the only thing they do is slowing you down. You realize that while your hands are full of things, your heart is empty of emotions. In due time, you understand that your love is limited, that it is not made to be given all at once. You understand that if you are crazy enough to blindly gamble it all, loss is inevitable. I loved, gambled, lost. More than a person, I lost my senses. The sense of home, the sense of myself, the sense of reality. So in 2017, I became selfish. My loved ones certainly felt the fall: I stopped calling, I stopped updating, I stopped opening up, I decided to be that asshole that says I need to do this on my own, the one that takes days or weeks to reply to a fucking text. And while I should feel guilty about it, I absolutely don’t. I blossomed. I became someone different every two weeks and experienced more change than I ever did in my 25 years of life. I learnt to honour my feelings and feel better with who I am. To take back all the love I had given and focus it on who I am, on my body, on my dreams, on my ideas. I learnt to forgive and say sorry, to talk about things that are difficult, that still hurt, that not everybody can relate to. I learnt to stand up for myself, to fearlessly say “fuck off” to injustice, sometimes by favouring silence over big words, sometimes as loud as my heart hurt. I learnt to stop caring so much and keeping up with my life when the wrong crowd crossed it, to foresee goodbye as something positive. I took all the issues that were lying on my shelves and shook off the dust, stared at them for no more than two seconds to then wrap them all up in one box and throw it all away. I turned the question mark box into a final period box, burying the word “BFF” and all the fake friendships I was too scared to end, any hopes of my “person” to come back, the belief that my dad might one day want to be part of my life and the insecurities that convinced me that I deserved none of the things I always dreamt of. When I finally threw that one last box and my room was empty, it clicked. All it takes is to be surrounded by chaos to finally realize you want none of it. All it takes is to push yourself to say goodbye to no longer fear it. Once you throw the box and all that there is left is you, who you have become and the people who have decided to stay, it’s time to close the door and move. Move and Love. Not with all you have, but with all you are.

 

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WHAT I’M WEARING TODAY: ZARA coat & pants  // VANS shoes // YSL bag

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