When You're Alone

I want you to sit by yourself in your room. This is the moment you are wallowing, this is the moment you want to listen to sappy music and curl yourself up in a ball and feel all lonely. There are moments when you feel self-pitying, there are moments when you wonder how you are so young and so pissed off at everything. People piss you off. People cuddling on subways piss you off more. Instead of listening to music on your I-Pod and thinking about the time somebody kissed your forehead, I want you to look at the things you have collected over the years. There are the terrible pictures you have taken of yourself in college- the one where you were at a bar with your best friends and you make the ‘holy shit what am I doing here’ face, or on the beach where you are laughing so hard because somebody just threw sand at your crotch. The necklace you got from your grandmother is here and so are the flip flops you’ve had since seventh grade because your mom bought them for you. I want you to pick up the postcards you got and your favorite book that is creased by the sides. You have read this book so much you can finish the lines by yourself and you probably love it. Then I want you to pick up your phone and look at your text messages. The one from your roommate that asks where you are, or maybe the drunk ones late at night from all the people you couldn’t be with at the moment. Oh, look! Your favorite high school bud who tells you they miss you! I want you to pick at least five people from your phone that you can call because you are feeling bad. Don’t call them, just know you can.
I want you to look at yourself in the mirror. There is a scar on your chin from the time you did something really fucking stupid with some really fucking great people. There is the face that you have grown from a little shitting baby to the person you are now. I want you to make the lamest face you can in the mirror, I want you to remember all the things you like about yourself. I want you to laugh at it. I want you to stick your butt out at the mirror and smile.
Then you put on a song that reminds you of summer, or of driving in a car. Then you put on the song that you remember listening to when somebody was in love with you. I want you to think of the best memories you have had, and simply appreciate how you have had them. How you have felt something so big for somebody it made you nauseous and when they left, the best people in the world listened to you when you cried about it. You would feel that again, you think. You just might, you think. Refuse love being the end-it-all of your life. It happens and it doesn’t, and it usually happens again (which is what is so great about it.) Then I want you to cough or scream or raise your arms and simply remember how you are not alone. How you are here and you are here and that is where you are. And then I want you to think of the worst moments, the ones that made you feel shell-like and how you got over them. How you have the ability to get over shit because you are a person and people go through bad things and you are still pretty okay. How you can still laugh and give high fives and go to bars and not get how people function the way they do.
Then you realize how many more days you will feel alone. And how you sometimes crave figuring yourself out more than other things. And how many times going out or meeting certain people will make you feel like you don’t understand humans or how much you love them. Then you remember all your friends, and how much you will laugh at all the douchebags you have dated, and all the mistakes you have made, and how one of these things will always outweigh the others. I want you to allow yourself the biggest kind of optimism you can muster for the future moments of your tiny life. And I want you to sit by yourself and I want you to fucking enjoy it. Pick your nails. Eat a slab of cheese. Savor it.
Then I want you to not feel so fucking alone. You are not.

thefrenemy