[#247] Emotions (original)

[yoshishisha]

Theme Prompt: Lost for words
Title: Emotions
Fandom: Original Work
Rating/Warnings: Non-graphic mention of a baby's death (by illness), also a part in there is in French. First person POV
Bonus: No
Word Count: 874
Summary: A blurb about emotions I can't give a name to. And one I can't seem to feel right.


I don’t have the words, for the emotions I’m feeling.

I do have the vocabulary. I know the words individually and in relation to others.

I know about fear, about anger, about joy, about helplessness, about gratitude, about solace, about uncertainty, about madness

I can describe them front to back, attach them to a character and dive into their feeling like it’s my home

I know all those words, and yet cannot relate them to myself.

I am not an unfeeling creature.

Emotions inhabit me just as they inhabit any other being.

They fill me up or leave me empty.

Je les subis, je les vis

Ce que je ne fais pas, c’est les analyser, les comprendre, les examiner.

Pourtant j’essaie, mais sans succès.

Je m’arrête un instant, lorsque j’en prends le temps.

J’examine cette émotion, afin d’en découvrir la source et l’identité.

Je la prends tout doucement, au creux de la main métaphorique accrochée à mon cœur.

Je la prends, je la retourne, je la vis, je l’examine

Mais dans l’examen de cette émotion, je la perds.

Je l’ai sur le bout de ma langue, cette émotion.

Ses frères et sœurs, ses jumelles semblables, quasi-sosies et pourtant si lointaines se poussent dans mon cerveau dans l’espoir de me livrer la
bonne réponse

Et pourtant aucune n’est la bonne

I haven’t learned to give up on identifying my emotions, when the mood strikes me.

I think I should, sometimes I do

Because what does it matter if I can’t identify what I’m feeling so long as I keep living it and don’t let myself be controlled by it?

If I don’t let myself or others be harmed by those emotions I can’t identify, who cares if they are not making their identities known to me?

I think all that, and I believe it

Until something happens to make me question how I feel and what I feel all over again

Until my uncle’s baby dies before reaching two years of age, and I’m in the hospital room consoling him and his wife both, and distracting his 3-year-old daughter

Until I text my mother “He’s dead” two minutes later because I know she’ll want to know and be there as well

Until I’m surprised to see her so devastated when she arrives, because we found his brain cancer over a year ago and we knew for ages he only had a few more months to live

Because the doctor told us last week that their efforts were for naught, and he would die this week

Until she asks me “you told me that by text?” surprised, and confused, and loving, and I think

Oh yeah, it’s not polite to send bad news by text

Not polite, I repeat to myself as I notice that grief seems to be hitting everyone way harder than I thought

My uncle and aunt I understand, as they held this child and watched his life extinguish every day over a long year

My family, I understand less, as we had barely seen the baby a handful of time, and I honestly didn’t expect them to be hit so hard by it

I play with the daughter who doesn’t quite understand what’s happening in a different room, glad for the reprieve from being confronted by my own interrogation

I am glad?

Not the right word, but close enough

I am glad to be of service this way, to be an honestly playful presence for her and leaving her parents to their grief

I smile as the hospital worker tells me I’m so strong to help her in the midst of my grief

I smile with a “Oh, it’s no trouble!” peppy and cheery as the day camp monitor I once was to hide how unsettled I am becoming at my own unidentifiable emotions

I look at my brother and see similarity in the way neither of us seems to be hit by this, not really

I don’t see confusion in his eyes, nor do I see grief

I don’t see anything in his eyes, because I suck at reading emotions in people’s gazes

But I know he also doesn’t feel grief the same way our family is feeling it in the other room, around the baby’s corpse, and it reassures me

I may not know the words for what I’m feeling, and maybe I don’t need to

Emotions aren’t good or bad, just a state of being

Only in our response to them can we cause harm or good or maybe nothing at all

It was the absence of grief that made me notice I didn’t know what I was feeling

But it is the rest of living that makes me wonder about emotions

I feel them, I definitely do.

Joy and anger and sorrow and frustration

Probably

But I can’t quite tell if that’s what they are or if I’m overanalyzing them to the point where they become unrecognizable

I am now comfortable in my emotions

I go with the flow, let them come and let them go

I no longer listen at the door of my heart, trying to listen in on these emotions hiding their identities

Instead I let them be.

Comments

[badly_knitted]

Very sad, very powerful, and yes, emotions are hard to pin down most of the time, we feel them even if we can't say what they are.

[yoshishisha]

Thanks, glad it connected!