Letters to Rahel - Episodes of grief

Dear Rahel,

I feel like we're heading towards the end of this story. No matter how forward I look into the future, I can't see myself at peace. I am convinced that this is how it is going to go down. This feeling, this constant feeling of helplessness and chronic dissatisfaction. It is here to stay. This is how it is going to be forever. I don't feel like a real person anymore. I feel like the memory of a person, and memory's fading. Soon it'll be like I never existed. 

I have been having these episodes of grief lately. Why do I call it episodes of grief you may ask. I have been having days where it feels like someone had died. It's somebody's funeral. And I sit through the day trying to figure out who had died. It sure feels like someone I knew very closely had died. 

Maybe I'm dying.

I feel like I've been forgetting myself lately. Like you know how you used to be friends with someone back in school. You used to tell each other everything. And now you don't even talk, you don't even remember what their face looked like. That's how I feel, except for myself.

I can't remember the things that used to make me happy. The things I used to passionately talk about. The things that used to make me excited, or curious. How I laughed. I can't picture myself in the past sitting in peace and quiet. I only have pieces of memories with different people from different timelines. They all seem like a distant vision now. It's all fading away. I am fading away.

The worst thing is that these 'episodes' would happen during the most random times. I could be at work, already miserable, and this feeling would kick in. And it would feel like I am stuck in marshland. Everyone is moving at 2x speed and I'm in .5x. I'd already be mentally exhausted, by the people and noises around, but at the same time, this silence would start to occupy inside me. Like a thunderstorm slowly hitting a town. 

Since moving here I've been going through different phases, in life to get through each day. There was a denial phase where I carefully navigated my mind away from any sort of thoughts. Then there was a poetry phase where I turned to words for getting through the day. There was a to-do list phase where I would list down every little task and would get through the day by crossing each of them. Then I had a crashlanding phase where I used to deliberately think of negative things and wreck my mental health pretty badly. Right now I am going through a phase that I like to call "Trying not to cry in public transport". It involves almost-breakdowns at random places like office toilets, stairs, restaurants, under halogen street lights, etc. 

The point is, it's been more than 10 months and I am still fighting to get through every day. I don't think I'll ever figure out this life thing, Rahel. I don't think I will ever get good at this. I don't see myself doing this thing day in-day out for a lot of years. I've stopped looking so far into the future. There's nothing there.

Sayonara