Untitled, With Love

Cycling back a long distance from eight hours of work on a Friday evening, I watch the sky spread above me: blue, blue sky with cumulus clouds drifting majestically with the winds. It's picture-perfect, with tints of orange and red seeping in as the sun sets away into another time zone. The sky above me looks like a dome of royalty. My posture straightens up, and I'm listening to tame impala.

I don't think the six month younger me would recognise the person I am right now; it's for the best. I wouldn't have imagined going from crying into my pillow with alcohol-riddled blood and hickeys from a person I didn't love to someone who can appreciate the sky.

I don't think glow-ups are physical. They can't be. You can't escape wrinkles, and you can't escape hairfall. You can eat all the fruit you want to, rub all the strawberries you want on your face and eat as many eggs as you can, but you'll age. It's beautiful, but glow-ups aren't physical. A glowing face can only be achieved by inner peace, or the closest you can get to liking yourself. Or loving yourself. Preferably the latter.

Glow-ups aren't physical, otherwise I'd be a lost cause. Glow-ups are spiritual, or emotional, or mental. Confidence, intelligence or whatever positive attribute that isn't based on your tits or your face or your zits vanishing after a sheet mask. The best glow-up is cleansing yourself from within, but on the other hand, did you really need to be cleansed? Or did you just have to water what you already had and watch yourself bloom into a beautiful hibiscus? I believe it's the latter. Otherwise I'd be a newer, faker person by the years, my body an emptied husk. I'd be a lost cause.

The fear of losing yourself remains when you've lost yourself even once, but why does it still stay when, for once in your lifetime, you completely understand yourself? Maybe it's the fear of turning into someone else again and not recognising yourself. Maybe this euphoria is fleeting. Maybe the trauma will strike back on a rainy night when you're alone and a guy you truly liked tells you you're a bad person. In those cases I hope you have a person to call and cry to and they run to wherever you are, with an ice-cream biscuit in their bag and a hug to embrace you in.

Maybe you're scared of losing your passion for things, your love for people and eventually your will to live because it's happened already; maybe you fear darkness because you resided in it comfortably when you couldn't see light. Maybe you're scared of reading what you wrote - the aggression in your poems, the cries for help riddled within the lines of your comedic prose and your non-traditional stroke of paint amidst conventional paintings. Maybe you're scared you'll never feel the urge to read an article again, and maybe you fear transience in your well-being. Maybe you're scared of picking up a piece of cake and feeling disgusted in your skin again, or not running for a month and feeling lethargic again. Maybe you're so scared of losing dopamine that you're now a slave to spreading yourself out thin to every source of delight you've known and you're working yourself to be a better slave. Maybe it's everything packaged in a cute brown box labeled "For you, with love".

Maybe you're paranoid. Maybe what you fear is just what you fear. Maybe you've earned some peace, at least for a non-trivial amount of time. Maybe you're comfortable - maybe not happy, but comfortable - with yourself. Maybe nights by yourself don't feel as bad because they truly aren't. Maybe it's fine. Maybe the war you've waged against your neuro-atypical brain is finally over.

Maybe you deserve it. Just maybe there's a possibility of not relapsing. I live for the maybe