Other kinds of blue
Sometimes when my chest feels full, I would write something down.
Most of the time they take forms as gibberish on my journal or my phone’s note-taking app. It could be a poem—if my thoughts find their rhymes. Sometimes they are delirious 280-character tales I tweeted at almost one in the morning that I would regret-delete by the time I woke up.
But on the best and worst days, they are works of fiction.
Those stories I wrote were my wild cards in cheating life or deceiving feelings—as if writing them down as someone else’s experience was like telling their melancholia as my own, while in fact, it’s the other way around.
When I write stories down, I give my characters names. She could be a namesake of a childhood hero or a quirky-sounding book character that I relate so much with. Or, I would just choose a meaningful word I’d like to name my future daughter with if I ever change my mind about having children.
Or sometimes, when I feel like breaking barriers, I would write from the first-person point of view.
Either way, they were testaments to what I feel.
The character—she would be about my age and do what I do, or maybe work in a field I failed to survive in, or a job I’m too scared to jump into. When I want to hide my feelings as mine but tell them at the same time, she would be way older and of a profession strayed furthest away from mine.
But she would have my experiences, carry my trauma, and share my burden.
The differences take many forms. She could be way better in handling her anxiety, which attacks as frequently and as persistent as mine. Or she could be worse, but I would give her somebody that could help her cope with it.
When faced with adversities she would deal with them the way I wish I did when it was happening in real life, she would say the words I managed to put together after it had passed and I had the time to think and reflect.
Maybe they would possess my characters, or they would bear themselves the ways I wish I could behave under my unconsciousness.
They would also be stressed out like every adulting-person is. But she would cope with the way I don’t play with, like smoking or drinking two glasses of wine that would give me hives for days.
She would have a significant other. He would be a person of passion with an understanding of her quirks, of her likeness in keeping herself busy, her need to allow herself regular alone times, and her anxieties of living life incorrectly. He would love her just the right amount. He would make her happy and help her being happy on her own.
She would be in a relationship that I only ever had failed to keep, with the person that I have yet to meet, attached by an ample dose of commitment I never brave myself to pledge.
Sometimes I become unhappy over things even myself thinks doesn’t worth the tears, so she would experience hurtful things, way worse than what I had, to justify my pain.
Sometimes she would achieve greatness in life that she could for once be elated because at times I don’t celebrate life even when something good is happening, or special days are coming.
In all of those stories, the color is blue. Even the happy part sounds like a melancholy. Maybe because I only write when I feel like I had to cry.
When I revisit those stories, the pain they embody, they no longer feel like mine. But I remember which wound of my own they represent.
They are no longer mine, they are the characters’. But their anguish, their sorrow, their heartbreak, their emptiness, even their joy—I could still feel the color blue in them, only they had gone off my course, and became other kinds of blue.
