Ejiro
Ejiro
Nov 7 · 3 min read

It’s 2 a.m. and as usual, you’re up. You convince yourself that it is because your body has been somehow programmed into becoming an active burden at certain hours. You don’t address the gnawing feelings of loneliness, need, and discontent that has no real root. You’re embarrassed to even let those words form on the slope of your tongue because you have been told countless times that you should be grateful. You have a roof over your head. You attend a university that more than half of your peers back home do not even have the luxury of envisioning their place in. You wake up everyday to the buzzing sound of constant electricity and have conversations with people who go to places like France and Italy for “summer holiday”. You have never been to France, although you always wonder what it’s like to be surrounded by such an exquisite language and to eat wine and cheese with the Eiffel Tower hovering above you of course. You rarely question what the term gratitude means but you just know that it is something you should and must express at all times. So at times like this you force yourself to think about the amazing food you had the previous day, or the look of satisfaction and pride stamped on your face as you scanned your image in the mirror. Anything at all to distance yourself from the endless battles and anomalies of your existence. You think about love a lot and the somewhat reassuring idea that it is something you deserve and will get eventually swallows your convictions. You know that love will not solve all the problems that seethe beneath your skin but you know that it will dissolve most of your chaos in the simple, wholesome want of another. You want the satisfaction of having someone to hold on to on days when your inadequacies are all you can think about. Someone who will value you much more than you value them. Someone who will see through you, and make you feel less alone (not that you always despise the idea of being alone though — it is when you’re most at ease, but sometimes that warps into emptiness and unresolved need). You know the prospect of finding this someone exists but there is also this denigrating fear of something never becoming that sits and stares at you with unmoving eyes. It unravels you ruthlessly, reminding you yet again that you need to grow more hair, eat less junk and shred more weight, speak more assertively and smile more. It tells you that unless you somehow find a way to be perfect (which is in the slightest way not possible), you will never attain that feeling of completeness and self-security that you so desperately want. It’s like you’re always stuck between two conflicting ends — you love being alone but yet you hate it because that is when you’re most powerful but vulnerable, you revel in the peace and warmth of not always striving for perfection yet it feels like something is missing, you brace yourself with the fact that you have been bestowed the gift of creative freedom but hate that you can’t measure up to flimsy ideas of substance and perfection. You’re used to staying up late and letting it all out like this, while ignoring the dreadful responsibilities that will continue to haunt you the moment you wake, but you fear that one day it might drive you insane.

Ejiro

Written by

Ejiro

love, astronomically.

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