content warning: mental health

1. The window outside my office opens into the branches of a big, strong tree. It’s autumn: the season of me staring outside the window and getting lost in its ochre. Sunlight filters through the leaves and falls onto my hand. Ugh, I want to be loved like that—like warmth and fall and softly filtered sunlight on brown skin.

2. My ‘most played’ playlist on Spotify is called ‘angina’—a 7 hour and 38 minute long, meticulous collection of every song I know that feels like being punched in the gut by loss. I play it in the background at work fairly often, especially when that mountain of emails makes me wish for death.

3. I firmly believe that there are two times you die—the first time you refer to him in the past tense, and the last time you hear his voice. As I stare, once again, at the falling leaves outside my window, I remember another time you die —the first time someone breaks your heart that’s not him.

4. I have several emails to reply to, several events that need my attention, several people to message in a paranoid grappling with human warmth that I’m too scared to explicitly ask for.

5. I need to go to the staff kitchen to get some coffee. I’ll stop by and say hi to some of my colleagues. A few “How are you?”s will be answered with obligatory FINGER GUNS—a resounding gesture both my bisexuality and anxiety rolled into one. Coffee makes me want to pee. Someone told me it’s a “diuretic” and I have no idea what that means.

6. Coffee reminds me of long nights, many of which I have spent hoping for sunlight to filter through my windows as a mark of survival—Yay? I made it to another morning?

7. I looked at him like I look at the sun—no direct eye-contact, aggressively squinting, grateful for the warmth. I admire the sun like I needed him, like he was the morning I lived to see, like he was necessary for survival and sporadically absent for half the year. It’s slightly funny that he always broke my heart in winter. Absence of heat, absence of sun, absence of him.

8. Winter was always December where I grew up, and it made sense that Old Monk is as essential in the cold as jumpers and beanies—an aged, dark rum, the symbol of heartbreak, warmth and many things that I cannot trap in words.

9. OHMYGOD WORDS, I forgot the EMAILS I WAS MEANT TO DO. I run down the stairs. The keys that hang from my lanyard jingle like a ringing reminder of capitalism. I grab them, and while I turn on the stairwell, the glass window reflects sunlight onto me. I wonder why I was asked to keep my keys between my fingers, in preparation of flight, when I can trap sunlight in the palm of my hands.

10. Hands—my hands are a bit dry and flaky; I need some hand-cream. The day after I collapsed under the table of my office wishing someone would hold my hand, I bought a very expensive coconut and shea butter hand cream from The Body Shop. Consumer-capitalist culture really does thrive on us filling human voids with heartless products.

11. My mind drifts to this morning in the shower, where I gnaw at my skin, healing in layers. ‘Angina’ is playing in the background, I think to myself, “Hey, that used to be our song!”

    “Fools falling in the dark like crazy
    You know, nothing you can do will save me
    No, might as well”

    All our songs were on my playlist. All our love was in my heart.

12. I finally open my emails and realise that I will always have meetings to attend, emails to respond to and people to love that I will feel responsible for, that will replace me if I die, immediately and easily.

13. It’s ridiculously cliche but I take a minute and feel the sunlight fall onto my palm. I love the sun like I loved him, like it reminds me to wake up, like it’s so necessary and too much of it can cause acne? and burns.

    “Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, I’m still breathing
    Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, so what’s one more scar
    Break my broken heart”

14. EMAILS. I FINALLY RESPOND TO MY EMAILS—after having written this stream of consciousness. Probably.