And just like that things went worse again. It’s not like you didn’t think that moment would come – just maybe not so soon. Your favorite song was interrupted by the church bells. 11 AM. Ascension Day. 

Today you were going to draw your flatmate. Nothing much to do elsewise. Maybe play a little soccer in the park later. A holiday during a pandemic was even more lame than usually. 

When you opened all the windows in the Atelier to air it, you heard a woodpecker in the maple trees close by. You sat down and drank your coffee, black, because the oat milk was gone and you were too lazy, well, more like too weak, to go to the supermarket. Plus you didn’t have the nerves to walk past the cheese cubes or the frozen pizzas again. 

There was a wren who lived in the wine tendrils down at the canal who seemed to enjoy the warmth at your window. Multiple times a day you were able to see him jumping up and down the winter garden, not moving a single leaf because he was so small. This exact wren stopped by you today, too. He sat there, as the swan was hunting ducks and coots and made a scene, as always – and just watched you. A living being, probably not able to feel what made you cry. Hopefully, you thought. The whole bird itself smaller than your heart. The thought made you smile. Nature was so fascinating. 

Sunday.

It had been raining. Strong, heavy rainfalls, emerging wind that grew to heavy flurries. As swirling and unsteady the outsides got, as deep and calm became your sleep and mind. All the trembling and shaking and pulling and pushing made you weary and tired. But in a releasing, freeing way. Deep breaths and working against the jaw clenching. Last night you got a very good sleep, not many dreams. Your window was opened the whole night and only the droplets and songs of birds accompanied your resting. 

The hours at the dinner table with your flatmate were always attritional and exhausting, but they made you realise a lot who you are. How happy you were with the human being you are. In some way, her perspective grounded you in yours, and made you more fond of your growth and striving. 

Your Italian flatmate stood next to you and you drank your coffee, looking at his hands, working up a pizza dough. You would have loved to tell him what was going on with you earlier, but somehow you had not been able to do that up to this day. He smirked when you were done summing up the latest events and said:

Hell, nah. We don’t need that. 

You smiled and shrugged, then sighed. 

Yeah, I suppose. 

There is so much better in this world. There is so much more. 

Today this didn’t hurt you anymore. People come and go, they hurt you, they make you smile, they move you even – but your worth never changes. Not when you're making mistakes, not when you're a supposedly exemplary person. Recognize who tries to shift your view on your worth. Let some people show you how much they see your worth and treat you accordingly, let some people try to treat you below your market price and set your boundaries. You have you. You are yours. Some people will be able to say that they have come close to you, some will not have had that honor. 

People can still make you smile if you want them to. That’s what you wanted to have said, eventually. People will still be able to charm you and make you feel comfortable. What you feel is valid. Who you are is valid. And there were so many people who were able to acknowledge that and treat you accordingly. Exceptions prove the rule. 

And yes the ones that got away - well, more the ones you let go and became independent of - will listen to the songs you showed them thinking of someone else. Inevitably, they will. If you’re honest with yourself you have been doing that a lot, too. You have hurt people, too.  

Another day with hours of drawing, music and listening to audiobooks while drinking several litres of coffee. This morning you got the job you applied for. Today was a good day. You couldn’t bring yourself to eat something, but maybe that would work later. 

Your flatmate read you Russian poems while you were drawing carefully and that was very nice. 

Of the pearl’s light and agate’s clouds
Of the such fairly smoked glass,
By slopes of so sudden mounds,
She sailed such solemnly in skies –
As if the Moon Sonata’s sounds
Had cut our roadway at once.

- Appearance of the Moon 

(From "The Moon in Zenith") 1942-1944,

Anna Akhmatova

You don’t know why you never considered Russian to be a beautiful language, but through the word by word translations you could get a feeling for how Russian worked. Your favorite saying of the day was “to grow wild of something”, which was supposed to mean “not being used to something anymore”. You yourself had grown wild of feeling small and misunderstood, you had grewn wild of being mistreated and left behind. But this growing wild had, funnily, made you more certain in what you deserved and what not. So you had also grown wild of being silent and submissive. 

It was a very peaceful day at the canal, the geese were quiet and seemed to enjoy the heavy warmth that sat under the clouds. 

Somehow on this day you reached a new check point. And you hadn’t seen in coming. 

But some part of the dark stinging fire that kept lighting up and splitting you in two, some of it had gone out. 

You don’t know why that happened or how long it was going to stay this way – but it felt like a small but significant stone had dropped off your chest. The memory of a game you played as kids came up, where you pressed your hands with all force against the wood of a doorframe you stood in and when you released them – it felt like your arms where flying up to the ceiling. Just with your heart this time. 

Or as if somebody had attached a balloon to you, filled with helium. Lifting some of the weight for you, so you didn’t have to carry it alone. Could have been all the long talks and loving words you received, that were like a thick medicine you could smear all over yourself and just lie in this big pile of feeling loved. Could have been the Russian poems. Could have been your flatmate telling you, after she flipped through your sketchbook and heard you casually singing:

It’s so annoying. Why are you so talented?

What?!

Are you trying to bully me?

(With a surprised look) No, not at all. Not now. I think

I just have to accept that you are talented in some things.

Especially things I am bad at – that sucks. 

Could have been these reasons and many more – but you knew it was something different. Because when you woke up and started to go on with your day, when you spent hours and hours of drawing, little stuff and big stuff, working out, finally getting some nutrients in your system by 7PM, already shaking at that point; because when you saw the sun setting above the rooftops and color the fluffy clouds cotton candy pink and the sky bubble gum blue, when you listened to Vivaldi and showered, when you sang loudly to your favorite broadway musical and loved your voice every second of it, when you did all the things that make you and make you happy – 

it was like one of your exhales just extinguished a part of that pain. And left a little forgiveness. A little sorrow without the burning hate. Empathy. And a big chunk of inner peace. 

Proud of your art and what you achieved on that day, you inhaled through your nose, noticed that you kept pushing the minutes you spent crying to a minimum these days and your exhale was forced by a giant smile that finally climbed on your lips. 

Yesterday you went without crying – almost. Somehow something came back, when you placed your pillows like someone was hugging you, cuddling you. And yes, that was sad and it was lonely, but not the reason why you actually started crying. You remembered that the night gown you had on was a piece of clothing you wore when you last saw her. A piece of clothing she kissed you in. And there you were, lying in the same bed sheets and wearing the same night gown and then you just took it off and cried a little. Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice in the background consoling you but hurting at the same time. You could hear him say: 

Right now there’s sorrow, pain – don’t kill it. And with it the joy you’ve felt. 

You took out your phone and watched a video of the last time she was with you and your flatmates. You laughed a bit, but it didn’t make the hot lines of tears on your temples go away. The laughter didn’t dry them. 

That sounds so exhausting, Thea. Aren’t you tired of playing this game always?, your old friend asked you on the phone earlier that day.

Is it a game really?

Well, that’s what it looks like to me. Like ping pong. 

So what do I do?

You could put down the racket?

That hit you. 

I will not give up or back down, 

you said a little bit angered. 

You’re not giving up, you don’t back down –

 you stop the playing and force your playmate to a genuine reaction.

 You’re still there. But you don’t pick up the ball. 

And sooner or later she will have to do that or leave the arena. 

The meaning behind this metaphor struck you deeply. 

Or maybe you try a topspin?

A topspin?

A topspin, isn’t that this sick shot

 that always strikes your enemy out of nowhere

 from the left downside and you just can’t catch it? 

(Pause)

Call her?

She won’t pick up. 

Do you know where she lives?

I do.

So, ring her doorbell.

Yeah sure, and if she’s not alone I will break down. 

At least you know what you’re up to then. 

Bring your ping pong racket and 

when she opens the door and she has company, 

you just let the racket drop. Like a mic drop. 

(Small eyeroll but with a smile) 

Anyways, that would cross her borders. 

Is she respecting yours?

End of story. There was that inch of honesty that was reserved for good friendship and good friendship only. While Mr. Pearlman was visiting Elio in Rome, you slipped into a dream where you met her friends and begged them not to tell her how much you’re crying at the moment. 

Out of some strange instinct you felt like texting the person that made you realize you’re gay. Maybe you needed the sensation of healed wounds. This is what she always made you feel: sympathy and connection stay. Wounds and the inflicted pain vanish. Always. If you let them heal. 

As you were talking to her, reminiscing and enjoying her way of being, which was always like a smirk - a sad one from time to time, but still a smirk – you figured you needed to take more care of your body. The occasional days without food and then days with loads of alcohol and pizza and sweets were not doing you good. And all that crying and the dehydration, too. 

Also there was a short circuit somewhere in the night and as you were undressing, the light bulb on your night stand and the charger of your phone went powerless. And it got dark and silent. This time it wasn’t scaring, it felt safe. No light, no messages, no alarm clock, no notification that you should have turned off already but couldn’t force yourself to do. Another night with very diffuse and strange dreams, but by now you were almost interested in what your brain would fabricate out of your worries and thought spirals.  

After the good talk you had, somehow you were able to clean up your room the next day. No idea where that came from, but you were happy about it. You lit your favorite scented candle, collected the accumulated glasses and plates and coffee mugs and then made your bed. When you looked out of the window, you could almost touch the huge maple tree which was moved by the wind, like it was running from one firm hug to another one. The wind on your skin made you notice that it was warmer than the last days. No sun today either, but the temperature had risen, was softer, was more gentle and not so stinging and hurtful.  

You could hear your flatmate making coffee and the anticipation hit you a little bit unexpected. The sound of boiling water. Clattering, that transported two heaped tablespoons of grounded cheap coffee into the French press, the clanking of trying to dust off any excess coffee from the spoon into the glass body. And the sound of the water being spilled into the brown powder with a slowly higher turning sound, climbing its pitches, until it had reached the desired volume. About a litre of coffee that took just three flatmates or two to empty. In a few minutes. 

Nature has cunning ways of finding your weakest spot, you thought. The soft stroke of the wind coming through your window urged to resurface a memory of lips, and the care and affection that went into the touch in that exact spot. 

Later that day you went on a walk with your flatmate. She kept stressing that she would love to have your problems because she had it so much worse. In some ways she was so utterly bad at consoling or empathy itself, you could have a jaw drop and a good laugh about it from time to time. 

Oh well, oh well. There she went. 

She’s not my ex, you thought. 

She rolls her eyes at you and sighs. Of course not. How could you assume elsewise?

This conversation started just because you went to the supermarket you cried in the day before yesterday. 

When you tried to pick out a good cheese, your glance got glued to the precut cheese cubes. How could precut cheese cubes be your kryptonite. How could they. That was a bizarre and heartwarming story. You had to think back to the discussion you had on whether cheese cubes were a snack. She said no, you said yes. And there they were sitting, grinning at you in their perfect little shapes. 

I hate my life, you said out loud and the guy to your left lifted his eyebrows and backed off. 

Your flatmate asked you why and kept trying to annoy you by poking your side. The times you explained to her friendly that she was supposed to please stop that because she was crossing your boundaries by touching you unannounced and unwanted – they had exceeded an imaginable number. So you just didn’t react to her. It worked. She stopped.

But then you remembered that the only person who understood you on that topic was now gone and you could not go to her and rant on how annoying your flatmate was being. This fact made you even angrier, so you just went to pay for the stupid cheese and waited outside. 

Today you weren’t sad. You were angry. Your therapist would’ve been so proud. And you were so angry. 

Standing in your room, you held your breath. The saltwater of your eyes stinging on your sore nostrils which you wiped uncountable times the last days. Why the wave of pain hit in this exact moment, you can’t quite figure out. Was it that her name was not on the first mentioned people who watched your Instagram story? Could be. Did you scroll through her feed and fed off of her smile and her dorky poses? The picture you took? Probably. Or was it that her profile picture changed to your most favorite childhood picture of her? Most definitely. 

It bothered you endlessly that she had stepped foot into your home. The places you shared with and developed especially for her. Your whole interior matched her aesthetic, or at least you tried it to. Just a few hours ago you took off her postcards from the walls and tucked them away in the Macbeth she got you from her favorite bookshop in NYC. 

Just yesterday you went out with a very good friend and said: 

            I have to remind myself that I didn’t do that for somebody else, I did that for me. 

            Somebody else might have had benefits from my choices, but I made them for me.

When you were eight, you asked your dad why the superhero in the strange movie you were watching together made that strange swooshing sound when he travelled in time or space. 

That is the air, rushing into the space he leaves behind when he departs to a new adventure, Thea, he said. It should be way louder actually.

Now you knew how loud it was, really. Only that it happened inside yourself. And in your home, every single time you pictured her, playing darts or going crazy about not winning a game. Or simply just sleeping in the exact bed you were staring at. Holding yourself, trying to keep you from shaking. Every single time you had these memories in your head and heart, they dissolved, leaving the thunder of the emptiness, trembling, making the space not just haptically but also acoustically ever so present. 

Well, that was exaggerated, but still. 

Hurt nonetheless.

What was probably the worst, was the part about not being able to blame someone. Sure, there were people to blame, but in the end – you could not influence, let alone change feelings or people. You could just change who you surround yourself with. As some stupid pinterest wallpaper would suggest. 

You had not been this way of heartbroken since you were sixteen, actually. And it impressed you a lot to feel how much you had changed in these rough seven years on such an intensive matter. Turns out, if you have a good self-esteem and self-conciousness, you can’t blame your intelligence, your weight or your sexual abilities, you have to take the hard and healthy road of heartbreak. The one where you have to sit it out and treat yourself well. Without fast and maladaptive coping mechanisms like diets or harming yourself via drugs and unhealthy hook ups. While we don’t mind the occasional getting drunk with friends and dancing crying with a wine bottle in your hand singing, no, screaming to “Dancing on my own”. Because that’s our business. 

On saturdays the bee doctor climbed up on the roof of the bike shed, where the bees lived. You loved the term bee doctor, it sounded so much more caring than apiarist. Beekeeper was fine, too. But you found bee doctor nicer. His name was Maxime. The bees swarming around him, he examined every single one of the dozen of trays. Carefully lifting the wood, carefully turning, precisely looking for things you didn’t know and precisely tucking the tray back. 

I want someone who cares for me like Maxime does for the bees, you thought. 

Well, not someone who is paid to visit you, obviously. But someone who stops by every single saturday. Someone who is not creating its life around you but integrating you in it. Counting on you. Like a cake is not about egg, not about butter or flour. But without it, it’s significantly different. Not worse or better. Just different. 

Does he get stung? Do the bees know he is good to them?

From your place at the window you could watch Maxime easily while picking the strings on your Gibson that made your fingertips feel like you touched a sun person. The song you had in mind and which you kept playing just stuck with you. Imprinted on your temporal cortex. 

It also made you cry in front of the deep frozen Pizzas at the supermarket yesterday, but that was arbitrary. At least you wished it was. You went out and stood in the sun for a second. The light made its way through the houses and onto a piece of the parking lot you were standing on. 

The afternoon and evening you spent crying in your room. When you went to the kitchen to prepare some dinner and your flatmate asked whether you needed a hug, you started crying so heavy, that the tears fell on the wooden floor in front of the oven. 

The next day your eyes were a disaster and your head hurt, badly.  There’s that. But your friend took you to play soccer in the church garden. She was the first person that didn’t make you feel bad about your concerning lack of ability to behave sportive around a ball. 

What remained? Now that all the quotes, all the songs you shared with her, everything that made you think of her made her think of someone else? The songs you wrote or covered for her she listened to imagining herself as the lyrical me and the “you” was not you but another woman?

First and foremost, there was a lot of - let me tell you that - a lot of anger. But after that? There was just a collection of songs, natural phenomenons, foods and smells you would never connect with someone else than her again. At last the memories. That sneaked up on you like hick ups. Unexpected and seldom but then, mostly, in rows, that you violently had to shut down, with the strangest coping mechanisms. Drinking a glass of water upside down or doing a handstand. Smashing things, crying heavily in public places or getting sick and not eating the rest of the day. 

So, what remained?

Bright red and blue socks. The scratchy black wool jumper Lisa gave you. Good books that made you laugh or cry. Strangers smiling at you. The sun, rising and setting, in all her colors. Moving you to tears, to dance, to get angry – music. The clouds, forming shapes, like apples or glasses. The ripples on the water that visualized the touch of the wind and stream. Deep dark grey and blue colors on a sky that was about to burst into rain falls. Ice cream and champagne, fresh pizza and bread, also Mango, a very mentionable contestant. The laugh of your friend Christine. Swans bitching about the ducks and hunting them. Unexpected compliments of strangers or friends. The elder tree hanging over the canal, that got bleached out by the sun, so it turned from deep purple to rose and to white eventually. And like the tree’s blossoms lost their color, her color, the pain in you faded. Ever so gently, ever so silent. It packed its bags. And sometimes it came back, because it realized it forgot something. So you dug it up. And you let it hurt. 

One day, you would hear her name in the mouth of someone else. One day, you would smell her perfume on a stranger or in the drug store. You stopped in your tracks, waiting for the pain to hit you. Bracing for impact. But it had gone. Its room empty and cleaned, the door closed. 

Today was not that day. But you knew that day would come, with certainty. So why hurry or slow it down? It would reach you, either way. 

Your mouth still tastes like puke. As if the universe wouldn’t grant you closure. As if it wasn’t enough. As if seeing seagulls and craws everywhere you go wasn’t enough. And just like that you are 14 again. Creating playlists to sing to crying. To lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling to. You fall asleep to the Smiths on your disc man. You forgot how pathetic you could become and somehow this makes you laugh about yourself. 

Over the best plate of arabic food you will find in the city you try to call home now, you try to push in the nutrients, because earlier that morning you cried, because you felt so weak. Your body is shrinking and while that sparks old shadows in your mind and feeds the joy of shrinking yourself so small that people worry, you try to withhold the sick lust of your long lost disorders. Your favorite place of them all is pretty much your favorite place because of its walnut paste and its down to earth mentality. Not at all pretty, loud and cold – but this one shop has the best food you ever tasted. 

You close your eyes and try to taste every bit of it. Every swirl of smoke, every soft brush of sweetness and every sting of acidity. You are asked whether you are alright and without opening your eyes you say: “Yes. Just trying to enjoy it.” 

A third way through your plate you are asked, whether she was very upset and hurt and suddenly it is all back. Your stomach gets angry about having food in it and tries to get rid of it. You breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and you try to say it calm but steady: “Let’s not talk about that, okay, just not now.” But its already too late. You are glad that you could eat most of your favorite cardamom carrots in the world before the giant stone in your stomach returned. 

You will go to the cinema and the smell of fresh popcorn will make you sick. In the soft dark and red plush you can cry silently if you want to. Sipping diet coke which is literally hard to swallow. Like a child you will feel angry and misunderstood but now your adulting perspective of reflecting your own doing in this whole disaster destroys your hiding behind childish naivety. This is harder than just finger pointing. Because if you were, you would find yourself shocked in the mirror, looking at your own face, your pointed fingertips just inches away from each other. 

You bathe in this feeling, even if it is obviously miserable of you. Sometimes you wonder if people think you’re stupid. As if you didn’t notice how they try to talk comforting and supporting and trying not to stir something up when it is almost unbearably obvious. You are so sad. You don’t want to go to that new city on your own, eight hours of train rides and stares into the grey landscape, a few days lonely in a bed that’s too big. It just hurts you so badly. It hurts so badly. And you don’t even have the right to feel this way.

You don’t want the cut on your finger to heal. You want to be reminded everytime you wash your hands and the water cleans the wound that this was a very happy moment. It will fade. Just like the cut, just like the blood. 

You don’t want to wash it off your clothes. They just lay there in the corner of your bathroom. You don’t want to wash it away. 

From time to time an old voice comes by like a stranger passerby that you share a glance with and he whispers “maybe this is the proof for what you always seem to find in people” and you end his sentence yourself whispering: they just want your body. 

Which is bullshit, you know that. But because of your past and what was done to you, what you did to yourself and what people let happen, old old hands of doubt crawl out of the dark and softly tuck on your shirt and your hair. This is the only thing they see in you, the voices say. Your body. The only thing that makes of your worth. 

And softly you start to notice that you make this about yourself. As always. It is always about yourself because the realisation that it is in fact about someone else and their decision against you is not bearable at any point. It is not about yourself. It is about someone else.