Maybe realness

Cree

I find myself hunting a particular sensation, one that is difficult to define and resembles no other.

You never see it coming, but when it arrives, it perfectly submerges you. 

It can arouse your skin, juice up your brain and utterly commence your aliveness.

I call this feeling realness.

I welcome this special feeling, as it is often so easy to become mired in the everyday stresses and responsibilities of being human. Sometimes I feel as if I am stuck in a depressing reality of dulled senses, just sleepwalking through the days on the calendar. 

However, when/if I am lucky, I'll catch a glimpse of this realness, and these occasions will leave souvenirs to hold onto. 

Unfortunately, these mementos are not enough to satisfy me, and quite regularly, I find myself longing for this feeling to revive me just once more. 

After many failed attempts, I’ve had to accept that it is impossible to curate such a moment.

Maybe I should endure the possible truth that all I will ever have are these fleeting memories to hold onto.

Here, I introduce to you some of these recollections; moments when I surrendered to this otherworldly feeling. 

None are alike, but each one has cracked me open.

I hope you can feel this.

When I was 15, my mom died, and it was the best and worst feeling of all time.

It felt so good to finally have a proper excuse to hurt so badly. When she was alive, I could never really give myself a reason to feel sadness. I was too busy protecting her from bits of the world that could harm her fragile spirit. Our family taught me well, and we were all quite skilled at normalizing the daily suffering that she brought into our lives.

But then my mother succeeded in hurting herself past the point of return. The panic of her death was always in the back of my anxious brain. I was forever on edge, waiting for something terrible to happen, something she could not take back with a half-hearted apology and a two-week rehab stay.

I can recall everything about those first days after the cops found her body. The air was vibrating. Everything was new and fresh and full of wonder. I stayed in her bed all day and night, hiding in the sheets that still smelled like her lavender lotion. The bedroom that was once my mother’s private kingdom was now mine to conquer, and I took full advantage of that. I opened every drawer, searched in all her purses, and never made up the bed. 

It felt as if I had been comatose and then jolted into a foreign life that was full of possibilities. 

The numbing pain of everyday stresses and anxieties was out the window.

I didn't have to worry about her anymore, and all that was left was this real feeling of the uncharted world welcoming me to explore.

I remember feeling this realness when I lived in that big house in Decatur.

I was spending the afternoon with the person I was dating, and at first, it was an ordinary day. 

We were both exhausted from lack of sleep, and famished from roaming around the city and having only eaten olives and sweet lunchbox peppers.

We were listening to Black Marble, laying on that stupid gray futon, and writhing in melancholy; the favored past-time of our brief relationship. The dark bass lines and morose vocals had a way of heightening the sultry mood we so often formed. We undid each other's clothing and found our bodies tangled up together, intertwined and intoxicated.

You always welcomed my touch, and I luxuriated in traveling all over your balmy skin with my mouth. We moved in unison and found our steady rhythm, which was slower than all the other times.

I was seeping into you and my hands were soaking you up. I stared down at your face, watching how your mouth opened and closed, listening to your small desperate sounds escaping. Each sound incited a lusty arousal in my body, and I could feel the proof of my devotion to you, warm and dripping down my thighs.

You didn't touch me. You didn't have to. I felt your hand reaching into my chest cavity and squeezing the life essence out of my tender body.

I had heard stories of what sex could be like, and not until then did I understand what they meant. It felt as if I was purposefully stepping towards self-destruction. So ready and able to walk with death. 

We were so terrible for one another, but that day, being with you was perfectly real.

But damn, it felt so real and terrifying when my little sister moved in with me.

You were only 13, I was 21, and our dad dropped you off along with your dog and a trailer full of your belongings.

I came home from work to find all of your furniture piled into my living room. Who knew a 13 year-old person could have so much furniture. 

You were much taller than when I last saw you. You had this expression of a scared little animal that had been released from a safe and contained bucolic life and abruptly relocated to an intimidating, wild city. But you were very enthusiastic and took the liberty of introducing me to everything you brought along. 

Then, of course, you were hungry and I told you that I didn't have any groceries or the money to buy any. You didn't mind. 

So we opened the crackers that you brought and we shared the pepper jelly that I found in the cabinet. That was the extent of our dinner that night as we sat on my green velvet couch. 

What a strange feeling to have my family back together again. It only consisted of one other person, but it was enough for me. I knew that this would not be easy, but I was proud of the both of us for being brave and sticking together. And for choosing each other. 

I was definitely in over my head and I knew it, but it didn't stop me from feeling so goddamn happy to be beside you in the same state, in the same house, on the same couch. 

I felt like a real-life adult:

really terrified, really overwhelmed, really real.

Lastly, I must reminisce on the times when I had just started dating my current partner, and we would sit on the front porch and talk into the early morning hours.

We would drink too many glasses of wine, smoke a few too many cigarettes, and then take turns sharing our deepest wounds, tragic childhood stories, memories of our dead and dying parents; truths we were ashamed of and secrets we never thought we would tell.

One night we attempted to take a blood oath. We bared our palms and clasped them around the blade of a knife. It was a total failure: the knife was useless, and I was afraid of seeing my own blood.

In bed the next morning, I rolled over to see your squished up sleeping face and scratches on your palm.

I was so impressed by our failed attempt. 

At one point in our relationship, I wanted to believe that those nights were the most real of them all. 

The times when we cried more than we laughed and then found our mouths messily pressed together in a briny embrace. But now our time together tastes of that realness without the dull knives, salty tears, cigarettes, and too many glasses of wine.

I can feel this realness even as you look up at me from your book and coffee in the morning.

Maybe you still don’t get the feeling that I am attempting to explain, which is totally fine. 

But here’s the thing; these memories give me hope and I need hope. I suppose we all need some form of hope. Because, as you know, no one explained that being alive was a challenging thing to endure when we came into this world.

These moments in time give me the courage to keep on going even when the world only seems to be made up of harm, never-ending pandemics, bills, duties, non-fulfilling minimum wage jobs, pollution, unsupportive parents, greediness, loneliness, anger, depression, anxiety, you name it. 

Hope can go a long way when you know that you can get completely lost in the dark void of your own chemically imbalanced mind without it.

Realness feels like a winning lottery ticket that some handsome stranger slipped into your pocket; a chance to be new again, even if it only lasts a moment. A moment in time to be totally stripped bare of all the noise and distractions that fill you up. A peek at what living can really feel like, or what you’ve always hoped it would be. A high that exists without the drugs and alcohol. There you can experience an accompanying wave of motivation that you so desperately needed; a little kiss of bravery to take risks and go out into the world and just fucking feel things. Even when sometimes those feelings are painful, frightening, and unknown.

These occasions of realness have consumed me to the point of this never-ending, somewhat exhausting exploration. 

Even though life is not always glamorous, easy, or fun, these moments of realness have given me reverence for this beautiful and strange existence that we share. 

I guess you could say that I am grateful for the challenges that I’ve faced because otherwise, I would have never experienced what living could really be, and because of that, I would not change a goddamn thing.