I promised myself to publish an entry here once a week when I started for me to have a space to process my feelings and reflect on the past week. And to somehow be more attuned to my creative self. I wasn’t able to that this weekend because I was just spent. My emotional bandwidth reached its end and I just can’t deal with the mess in my head. I felt numb about everything. The uncertainty of everything is just … *sigh*. I just wanted to hole up in my room and become one with my plants. You know what I mean?
There are days when my exhaustion from work would dip below sea levels and it would just leave me dry but swimming with feelings. Today is one of those days. I’m not physically tired but working in the Child Protection Unit just leaves me mentally and emotionally drained sometimes.
So here I am, on a Monday night, writing in my room filled with the scent of a candle in its warmer, trying to make up for the promise I made to myself.
It takes me about 15-20 minutes to get to my workplace. On better days when the traffic light fairy likes me and gives me green lights, I get there in about 10 minutes. I love this part of my mornings. It is when my mind is quiet, when I utter my most sincere prayers, when I feel most like myself. The drive home is a different story. It takes a little longer because of rush hour but I love it all the same. It is when I try to shake off whatever energy I absorbed at work, and try to slow down the adrenaline in my system. It’s like slowly turning down the volume of the noise outside of me and amping up the volume of my own head.
One day last week, I opened my Spotify like how I usually do it, saw that one of my favorite artists released a new song.
Oooh, Ed Sheeran has a new song, I said. I pressed play and started to drive.
The first line of the song punched me in the gut and my pent up feelings just rose above my head and I started bawling out of nowhere. I had to pull over and cried my eyes out for a good half hour.
I wish that heaven had visiting hours.
I learned a new word last week - saudade. It is a Portuguese untranslatable word and a quick online search will leave you with a meaning worded in more ways than one. My favorite one is this: a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost, “the love that remains”.
saudade
i think i can never translate
i don’t know how to say this
i can’t find the word for it
how your absence became the biggest presence
i turn my head
you’re not there but i remember
how the seat was not empty
i look at my hand
you’re not holding it but i remember
how you held it gently
the longing and the yearning
comes every now and then
nostalgic, melancholic
saudade
*subtitle lifted from this article