The Diary Of A Wistful Girl

June 25, 2024

Dear Diary,

I have this feeling in my chest.

Not painful like a heart attack, but painful like a yearning for something I am unfamiliar with. It aches dully and demands to be acknowledged. Felt profoundly. It hums like the texturized white refrigerator we all had growing up - a sound we tune out most of the time.

Then, one day you're at the sink washing the pesticide off carrots that've been waiting three weeks to be used and you hear it. The hum.

There's a swelling inside your ribs and you can't stop looking out the window at the field rippling in the breeze beside your driveway, the highway beyond it as cars speed past and the sun goes down again. Sometimes it will call a prickle to my eyes and a lump in my throat.

What's out there? I don't really know. I don't really know anything. I'm just here.

Washing the carrots.

Folding the laundry.

Going to work at the hospital or the restaurant or wherever.

I wonder where all those people in their cars are off to and where they have been. I always wonder where they have been. Maybe some place my sight would refuse to believe is real? I hope...

Things get a little melancholic for a while after that, but you put on a song and you lose yourself to the rhythm before that unmistakable, undefinable feeling becomes too much. I don't want it to consume me, but the hum is always there whether I acknowledge it or not.

What am I doing?

Why am I doing it?

Why can't I just be like every other girl that wants a ring and a baby?

I have this wanderlust-y thing about me that I've found not many can relate to. Not my friends or my family. Definitely not my partner. Everybody tells me to settle down, keep working that job with its pension and benefits, wake up every day at the same time and follow the same routine until there's nothing left of the child's mind I had in the woman I am today. I do it even though it's forced.

It'll never be what I want.

I want to be a speck of dust floating on a wind that circles the world again and again. I want to weather the storms, touch the mountains and seas, watch the seasons change from my resting place on a cloud. I want to be the ether. I want to be everywhere and nowhere at once, lost and so incomprehensibly found.

God, I just want to remember what it's like to take in a full breath and feel the oxygen tingle in my lungs.

But I'm only taking half breaths these days and the hum is all I try not to know.