Most people you saw around were waltzing through life because they couldn’t care less about most things. And then, there were the others. The others, like you and like me, we stopped now and then. We stopped in awe as much as we did in heartbreak.
It was this extreme propensity to feel. Some were born like that, some got humbled by life, but all of the others had one thing in common: they felt.
They looked at the sky after it had rained and felt it cleanse themselves. They looked at a tiny baby clapping his hands, sitting like a true king on his throne that was a table in a café and they couldn’t help but feel joy. They also saw something terrible and it knawed at their conscience for decades.
They didn’t just hear or see things, they absorbed them and made them their own. A gut-wrenching story someone told them would leave them with an emptiness that they would never forget as if it had happened directly to them.
But the others also suffered from a terrible possibility of losing themselves. If one felt everything profoundly, one often broke earlier than most. The human condition ran a bit too fast and far in them, and that was the curse.
The curse was also a blessing. Most of the others had to get it out, of course; else they imploded. The others were the artists, the painters, the writers, the oddballs who took things a tad too seriously and went a bit too far. But to them, it was natural, almost instinctive.
I was never told to write, and if I ever have, I have written terribly. The only time I can manage to get a few words out is when the words demand to be written. I’ve written on the curbside, in my flat, in cafés, on benches, in deserts, on beaches, and most of all, in my head.
All my life, I have been stopped in my tracks by all things terrible and beautiful, and always I have felt them to the core, and always I have let them devastate me from within. I do not know any other way to exist.
The only thing I know is that when you’re walking and you feel something, you stop and you put it down as honestly as you can. You’d know it too, if you’ve ever felt it—the desperate need to get it out.
If you didn’t, it ate you up from the inside.