Do I Lack Passion? Or Do I Only Miss it?

Near Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey

I don’t know about the beginning or the ending, but I know of everything in between.

It’s so easy to remember what you felt, when. But it’s achingly difficult to know beforehand, to skip the things you have said or incorporate the ones you might have said. That guilt taints things, it taints memories, but somehow, what you’ve felt always remains… At the brink of ruin sometimes, but remains nonetheless.

I’m at crossroads again and I’ve decided to tell the truth. The English language has become the boyfriend I can’t let go of because I cannot survive without the stability it gives me, but I don’t exactly love it with all my heart, at least not always. The mistakes I’ve made with it have been plenty, stupid, and very destructive, but I didn’t lose hope. It helped me survive in absurd ways, and now the world is so used to the concept of me being in a relationship with it. The end of it all? I feel isolated, unable to identify myself with anyone… Or any language. I no longer know what I’m capable of as a person, or who I become in a relationship. I don’t know myself enough to assert myself to a side.

I know people, ones that I could date, languages, in dashes and ellipses. Is that enough to be a writer? Knowing incomplete parts of more than one person?

The worst of all is that I feel incomplete in myself, with the world judging my relationship for sport, and there isn’t much I can do about it, except to maybe not think about it at all. The judgement morphs into pressure and there’s no controlling what version of me will empower all of me… The self doubt version riddled with bullet holes made by other people, aka the Swiss cheese personality ???

The confident but ruthless version that cares about no one, not even the smaller, sadder, less significant parts of me ???

The sad, wiggly parts of me? The ones that flow and liquidly fill up all of my body, with a mood of their own sometimes.

I don’t know whose arms to run to… Or if I should pull them back towards me and hold myself together. Every now and then, these questions take me in and dissolve in my veins and skin, they cloud the whites of my eyes and every where I look, I only see the absence of success and all things good. My privileged life looks like an ant hill to me then, where I dream to have flowered mountains greet me with their swollen smiles.

All these questions make it so uncertain for me to guess what’s in store for the future… and if that is a good thing? Why does it never feel like it? Why does it make me feel like a person with absolutely no ambition in their bones? Especially when that is not how I want to perceive myself… Because every successful person is always so damn certain about their decisions… So fearsomely confident in their pursuits. Here I sit, cowering in their confidence, relishing their success with an underwhelming smile… Not wishing them any ill will. Just a wish for me to get what they have even if its in soft, supple dosages.

Confusion sets the primary undertone for most of my days as I sit here inspired, blinking faster and faster and then not at all, staring at the floors on my ceiling. Then I blink faster to see the separate wings of the fans because if I blink really fast, I can sync with its speed, somewhat.

That is how confused I get, where a ceiling fan begs imitation, instead of all those artists who are now preserved as human history… Embalmed by the public, the dead ones.

There’s pungent aftertaste in my body then, all of it, after having wasted my Sunday, or the entire month I had free, or my vacation, or just a regular day even.

I miss being alone. I miss that carefree, instinctual love for English… I don’t like this overthought, sopping wet guilt.

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Haworth, Keighley, UK

And then I remember that there are things nobody knows. Like the pictures that my phone reminds me as memories are now my wallpapers and they don’t mean anything to anyone else in the world but me.

Love, emotions, the heat, the cold, the hunger, they make us do things we may never be proud of… Things, we never would’ve thought to have done, had we known it would happen in calmer times, where rush is inconsequent.

The aforementioned beginning, all things mentioned in it, can make anyone become what one would conventionally call “lesser versions of themselves”. It makes us more instinctive, rash, and susceptible to erratic changes in emotions and behaviour. We’d do things that we or even our friends and family would’ve thought unheard of from our experiences or just something that hasn’t been a part of our history. Something that feels completely fear-ridden, deranged since discovery… Like discovering an apocalyptic deadline.

There is so such that catches you unawares...

But like the boats in Gatsby, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.