It Should Be Easy

It should be easy, but it isn’t.

Let me amend that. There’s a difference between existence and living and the trick is to not conflate the two. You cannot for one second assume that living—this gerund of a word—is the same thing as the mere and simple noun of existence. Existence, surely, is the purer word form. It is what it is. A noun. Floating. But living, that’s some complicated business. Sure, it’s related, by being a noun. Yet it’s a noun derived from a verb. It is a form stemming from action.

Who really remembers the grammar they learned diligently in high school? And so we conflate the two, and we assume to live is to exist and that existence is a life. We think living is easy. But it is existence that’s easy. Breathe in and out. Take in nutrients. Maintain a level of hygiene. See? Easy. Nounish.

I need human contact all the time and I need to be alone. I love getting lost in my thoughts and I crave to break out of my mind. I give myself to people entirely and I can be so damn cold when I shut them out. I am sensitive and I am sarcastic. I want to be present and I relish reliving memories. I am tiny and I am strong. I hate when people play with my hair but I cannot stop twirling my curls. I value words most and actions always make me trust more. I want the lightest and heaviest in people.

Now forget all of what I just told you because a series of colliding contradictions cannot possibly elucidate the nature of a person.

Here is what I have come to know: the things that matter are verbs.

When I was two, my parents divorced. I didn’t see my mom for four years because my father hoarded me. But then I turned six and moved across a continent and an ocean to live with her in the Land of the Free. I started kindergarten and I liked a boy named Max, only I spelled his name “Makc” because I barely knew English. In fourth grade, I met a girl named Maxine and we proceeded to have dozens of playdates and I learned that one can be obsessed with a friend. I changed schools in fifth grade, leaving the isle of Manhattan for the substantially less cool bloc of Queens. A boy asked me out that year, and then I accidentally got him suspended, though the two are unrelated. A terrible hairdresser gave me a terrible haircut in arguably the most terrible years of young womanhood—6^th grade. But then when I was 13, things started to improve because I got into a great new school. Later that year, I dated my best friend’s ex-boyfriend and tried to figure out what dating meant when I obviously was not going to kiss him, well, ever. Then there was another boy in 9^th grade, and another in 11^th grade, and finally another in 12^th grade. My stomach learned a new growl, only related to that of hunger by a shared instinct of desire. Those were also the years when my hand never stayed flat on my school desk too long and giving the right answer in class became a thrill to chase. Writing became exhilarating. There was the time I ran to the computer lab in school to find out if I got into my top choice college, and then there was the time a few moments later when I realized I had and my friend next to me started tearing up, and I thought to myself her empathy was the bigger reward.

And that’s just the start. A world happened after that point. I picked up cigarettes, friends, and girlfriends. Groundbreaking kindnesses were spoken amidst plumes of exhaled nicotine. I kissed boys but wanted to kiss girls, and I learned to love taking a walk and indulging in the pangs of acute nostalgia for things impossible to identify. My music was constantly getting re-sorted into new playlists, and this act was and still is vital. There were moments when people said something so funny, or so flattering, that I begged my brain to never let the words go. 

On these things—on these actions slowly defining the flow of my life—you can hang your hat and say you know me. Because the nouns and adjectives, they really just prove the same point: they are changing. Their value lies in the fact of their transformation.

Living is most certainly not easy. It takes effort and time and pain and joy and reward and sacrifice. It is the constant flow of change, and the acceptance of those changes. Because to exist as I want to exist, to be the adjectives and nouns I have decided are worthwhile, I need to act. I need to live. I need to actively carve out my space in the air around me.

I am someone’s lover and one day she may no longer wish me to be such, but that does not change the fact that matters: I love. Her specifically.

I don’t know about being a Writer. But I certainly write.

Living is constantly becoming something. Something new or something greater. I hope that never feels easy.