She Says

It’s a beautiful, cold winter night. I’m sitting amongst beautiful people. The fire is crackling, bellies smiling, and the whole family is singing along the beautiful strumming of the guitar melody. It felt like a page out of those children’s story books. Such an impressionable moment, so magnificent yet pragmatic.

Everyone is so happy, including me. My heart is so full, then why do I feel so empty? I feel tears well up. Are these happy tears? No. But I’m not sad either. How can I be? Everything about this moment is so perfect.

But

I feel so lonely, surrounded by all these people I’ve come to love. I feel broken almost. And this moment feels healing almost, as if it’s trying to put my broken pieces together. But these pieces don’t fit. I don’t fit. Is this the imposter syndrome? I don’t belong here, I don’t belong to this moment, I don’t belong to this family.

They remind me of what I don’t have. They remind me what I can never have. Moments like these feel like scratching my barely healed wound open. Does your heart ever clutch with pain because you desire something you know you can never have? Mine does. Every moment I spent in that happy mixer, my heart cried because I knew I could never experience it again once tonight ends.

I have come to realize and accept that every moment of my life will always be enlaced with bittersweet moments. The happiest moment of my life will also be the saddest because of how incomplete it’ll feel. This is not something I, or anyone else for that matter, can fix. For a long time I thought this void, this hole, will be filled when I find the right person to fix it. But I know now that this isn’t something that can be fixed. It is just what it is- no more romanticizing it, no more waiting for someone else to fix me.