​What if you don’t have a mother to come home to?

​This sadness is not something that can be allowed to linger for too long.

For almost a year now, I haven’t been able to sleep peacefully. I rely on medication just to numb a pain that somehow spreads from my heart, fills my head, and slowly takes over my entire body.

Today, I took four pills. After that, I told a friend that I couldn’t come to meet them because I was away on vacation. But the truth is, I was only shutting myself away. I couldn’t bear to face other people. I just wanted to disappear from the world for a while to become something that didn’t need to be seen, questioned, or expected to explain anything.

I feel like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,. trapped inside a body that no longer even feels like my own.

My weight keeps increasing, even though I feel like I barely eat anymore. Everything feels like the result of these fucking medications that are supposed to calm my heart and my mind, yet somehow only make me feel even more alienated from myself.

And out of everything that hurts, perhaps the saddest thing is feeling unseen. Feeling like I don’t matter. Failing. Watching everything I have poured all my strength into end up feeling meaningless.

Come on, I’m only twenty.

Why does life already feel this heavy?

Why did this horror come so soon?

The darkness seems to be slowly spreading through my entire body. It enters my head, sinks into my chest, and settles there as though it has no intention of ever leaving.

I’m still here, but it feels as though most of me disappeared a long time ago.

Broken me, as miserable as I am.

​Broken me, as miserable as I am.

 

One day my mother will call me her little girl again, and my father will finally notice the weight behind my smile.

The people I loved will finally learn how to stay.

And I will finally receive all the words i once prayed for.

They will say,

"She deserved more."

But by then, i will have become a star in the sky... close enough to be seen, too far away to be held.

Di antara nadiku yang masih kujaga agar tak terputus

Mengapa gerangan aku dilahirkan,

ke bumi yang riuh namun terasa asing,
di antara hari yang terus berjalan,
sedang jiwaku kian letih dan genting?

Dadaku sesak menahan resah,
pikiranku penuh oleh ingatan
ingatan tentang luka yang tak kunjung sudah,
ingatan tentang pedih yang enggan berkesudah.

Aku telah menempuh segala daya,
aku telah berusaha

Maafkan aku, wahai jiwa,
jika hari ini aku begitu lemah

jika di tiap tiap harinya engkau berada di ambang kematian
aku penuh segala gundah.

kepalaku hampir pecah

Memori itu
masih menyala di dasar jiwa,
membakar perlahan setiap sudut rasa,
hingga aku lupa bagaimana cara untuk
percaya bahwa esok masih ada yang indah.

Aku tidak tahu
berapa lama lagi aku, sanggup bertahan,.
aku ingin mengadu, tapi aku tidak tahu. kepada siapa?

aku ingin memejamkan mataku dan tidur dalam waktu yang lama, lama hingga segala ingatanku tentang rasa sakit ini, memudar.

kepada sang kekasih

​Kekasihku,

jika kelak kau tiba

di penghujung perjalanan

dan menemukan tempatku berdiam, 

bawalah aku bersamamu.

Ke tempat yang cukup jauh, 

hingga riuh yang pernah membesarkanku 

larut perlahan dari ingatan,

hingga segala yang retak dalam diriku

menjadi samar,

Cintailah aku sesukamu,

sedalam samudra, seluas semesta, 

atau bahkan lebih dari yang sanggup kubayangkan. 

(maka akupun akan demikian)

Namun bila suatu hari

dunia memintamu untuk pergi dariku., 

(semoga hari itu tak pernah terjadi)

jangan berjalan menjauh.. sungguh.,

jangan biarkan yang terakhir kulihat adalah punggungmu., 

Sebab aku takkan sanggup, 

sebab, ada bagian-bagian dari diriku 

yang telah lama hilang, yang telah hancur.,

sehingga kelak, ketika engkau menemukanku 

(dan akupun menemukanmu)

engkau adalah satu-satunya tempatku berpulang.,

Elegy

​Elegy

Hi, I’m Lira.

If one day someone were to read my writings, perhaps they would think that I have lived for far too long. That I am somehow older than the number printed on my identity card, or that experience carved the face of my soul long before it was meant to. But that is not true. It is not because they have fallen behind me; it is because I have spent too many years running, simply so I would not be the one left behind.

Since high school, I have worked in several shops. Between shifts, I attended organizational meetings; between meetings, I studied; and between all of those things, I quietly arranged my future with a precision that was almost indistinguishable from fear. I planned my life so carefully, as though one small mistake could bring the whole of my future down around me. Perhaps that is why people often think I have a plan for everything. What they do not see is that they are only looking at someone who has become too afraid to stop.

I love philosophy. Not because I wanted to become wise, but because I found myself there. Among sentences that speak of absurdity, silence, God, time, and suffering, I found something I had never found anywhere else: someone who understood why a chest can feel unbearably full even when no tears are falling.

I was born into a family that was comfortable enough. I was not deprived, at least not in the simplest sense of the word. And yet, for reasons I still cannot name, there was always an empty place upon my shoulders waiting to be filled with responsibility. I grew up believing that being useful was the only way to justify my existence. So I learned to work, to endure, to smile, and to hide my exhaustion so carefully that even I sometimes forgot I was tired.

The saddest part is that I never truly lived my youth. I did not enjoy my years at university. My mind was always arriving in the future before my body had even left the present. While my friends were learning how to love the day they were living, I was busy learning how to survive days that had not yet come. My thoughts moved twice as fast as my life, and little by little I lost the ability to simply be a twenty-one-year-old girl.

I wanted only one thing: to be seen, just once, as a young girl with all the ordinary joys that should belong to a girl her age. I wanted to go home without carrying the weight of tomorrow, to sit too long in a cheap café, to laugh until I forgot the hour, and not feel guilty for existing without being productive. It sounded like such a small wish, and yet somehow it felt impossible.

Last year was the year that changed the way my body remembers. Something terrible happened, and ever since then it has felt as though a stone has been living inside my chest. Strangely, the world did not stop. People kept greeting me as if nothing had happened, kept inviting me into conversations, kept believing that I was all right, as though I was not walking through my days carrying ruins within me. They believed my smile. They believed my laughter. How easily the world mistakes survival for happiness simply because someone is still capable of making a joke.

I do not know how much longer I can keep going. Sometimes it feels as though the organs inside my body have begun to rebel, as though they surrendered before my mind ever did. There are mornings when waking up feels like lifting the remains of a house that collapsed long ago, and even breathing seems to require a kind of courage that no one ever teaches.

If I am allowed to be honest, there are moments when I wish I had never been born. Not because I hate life entirely, but because I have become too tired of carrying it. And if there is another life beyond this one, I ask for only one thing: may I be given a gentler life. A life that does not ask a young girl to spend so many years running merely to feel worthy of existing in the world.

Tonight I do not long for victory. I do not long for recognition. I do not want anyone to applaud everything I have survived. I only want to place my entire future on the floor, sit beside it, and for the first time in my life, not have to become anything at all.

I am tired.