That night, in my Brooklyn apartment, I could not decide between the fudge ice cream in the freezer, or the lucrative messages from my current match on Bumble. It seemed that time had been a restless settler, mourning over the last moment it locked eyes with someone who was unblocked, unlatched and not constantly indulging into a craving.
My body had been simply going through the motions. Not just on the app but in this life. I was missing the warmth of flowing events, where the sun would find my weakest spots and travel to a place that has not been inhabited. It wasn’t until that night, I discovered my addiction was actually about the hope and the recovery of the world. Hope was like the beginning of a relationship when you first make love to someone’s gaze. That moment of exploration that’s better than the actual physical penetration. There’s this intricate sensation of arriving somewhere very personal, and the activation of consistently trying to make something happen. My temporary curiosity was to see that a conversation was much wider than what we were taught to believe.
There’s a kind of imagination that the world offers you. How it could preserve stillness within a vacant lot, filling in the places where a garden would grow. I lived in my head majority of the time. Thinking of what people could be without such expectations. It was a strange addiction I knew I couldn’t carry with me. A dead end to a road which failed to give me an experience of being. As much as I kept searching for sentimentality, I knew the world was lost and I wanted to recall it back to the energy of its appreciation for steadiness. The more we rushed to feel for something that seems so unattainable, the more we crippled ourselves from being awake.
I grabbed the keys leaving that bankrupted night. Not knowing where I was going. In New York City, there was another world on every side of the road and I couldn’t help but to linger in its presence. In the corners of the night, around the half moon, I see myself in the places that I thought were impossible. Where hope wasn’t watching from the outside of what could’ve been.
