I Want To Live!

I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.

― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Can we really say that breathing, eating, and sleeping each day is life, even if it never feels enough for the heart?

What is this magnet within my heart, and where does it pull me towards? If an ancient butterfly were to flap its wings in front of me, I would know that wherever it goes both my body and soul must follow, even if it brings me no further than where I started.

All I can say about myself at this point is that I am something, I am somewhere, and trodding towards a lost forest whose name is forgotten and lost to time and gravity. A journey attempted numerous times, always met with a return to the start. But this time I am equipped with a torch and a map, and, more importantly, the stubbornness of life.

I wrote this to myself on my birthday, just a month ago:

Do you not feel like a pathetic thing? Of all challenges you've endured, of all affliction you have witnessed, why do you refuse to die? You are but an animal grasping for nothing, and that itself keeps you alive.

…

Yet here I find you, your mouth agape, your chest hardly with breath, your skin soiled umber, but your eyes eternally entranced upwards.

How have you survived, my dear beast?

― To Myself, After 24 Total Years

How have I survived?

The answer is life.

The answer is that I want to live!

To live rather than exist is a miracle in itself, and I have no doubt that this will be painful and difficult. I am reminded of this quote from Simone Weil:

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly."

I am equipped with the tools to navigate the path back to where I originate from, but the success of my journey hinges on the singular ability to admit that I am suffering.

May I commit each day to admitting this fact, to getting the help I need, so that I may weather both thunderstorm and drought. May I listen more than I think, for the only way to reach clarity is to set aside the "I" and admit that we are but one struggling species at our core.

Let me try again.

And try again.

And try again.

And try again.

Even if I fail, I know that I will have lived a life closer to itself than otherwise; what more could we ask of another?