What We Owe To Ourselves

Grrughg. Sharp breath in.

Ouch. My lungs are pressing against something hard, it’s tough to breathe. Something prickly against my face, my eyes seeing dark at first. I reach my hands out to lift myself up, touching grass.

Ugh. I feel a sharp pain in my chest, and I cough to try to ease it up. Did I fall?

I lift my head to scan the area, but fields of small grass only find me. I stand up and brush myself off, straining over some pain I feel in my thighs as I gather myself.

I see more fields of short grass in all directions. None of it looks familiar to me, and all of it looks so endless yet tranquil. Wait no, there’s something in that direction. I squint to make it out – a bench? And a large tree?

I start walking towards it, feeling like one of those horror scenes where the hallway gets longer the more you walk in it. My breathing feels heavier as I get closer and the sharp aches and pains don’t stop, where could we possibly be now, the confusion bounces around in my head as my pace picks up.

I reach the tree, bumping over roots overgrowing the grass, reaching out beyond me now. The tree stem lay thick and slumped over, reaching a few feet higher than me before branching out in all directions. But…there are barely any leaves. And so many of the branches look cut off, crackled and snapped at its ends by force instead of coming to a natural end.

I touch the tree, the bark worn and …cold. I snap my hand back almost automatically when I realize it’s nearly freezing. I go from admiring the tree to looking ahead, seeing the bench. I expected it to be a serene place to sit but it’s slightly lopsided because of the roots growing underneath it. I gasp as my eyes roll over to the right.

Red’s lying on the ground, his body draped over the roots, all his limbs outstretched. There’s some red patches on his face. I see his chest falling and rising, his eyes closed, and almost…relaxed, despite his messy disposition. I debate whether to even disrupt it before I take a step forward, snapping a branch under my feet –

“Stop.” His response was automatic. As if he knew I was here without a glance in my direction.

I stay silent. I don’t know what to say. I have so many questions. Where are we? What is this tree? How did we get here? Where-

“Thinking.”

“Wh-what?” I say, confused. I walk over to the bench. Another bench.

“Stop. Thinking.” He doesn’t sound exasperated with me now. It felt like a command. Or a plea. Either way, I felt compelled this time.

“I…I can’t control it. It’s part of who we are.” I don’t want to fight him anymore. I can’t. I can’t take it. Neither can he, so it seems.

“I know. Telling you to stop is a compulsion for me too.” He seems apologetic now.

I walk over to the bench. A touch reveals its cold metal, intricate patterns and designs smother it, and it looks long enough to fit maybe two, three people. I sit down, despite being a little crooked. An eternity of silence passes by between Red and I.

Red groans as he stands up, and looks to the tree. He seems captivated by it, more focusing on the winding roots on the ground, going above and beneath the grass and reaching out a little beyond our area.

“That really hurt.” His voice is shaky now. I’ve never known him to be hurt. He’s taken my hits before. Then again, I never felt so driven to hurt him before.

“I-uh.” My voice chokes up in my throat, choking on an apology that feels more like I have to do it than I actually mean it. I look down at my hands, a mix of regret, guilt and purpose pulsing through them. I still feel vindicated by my actions, but does that mean I can’t feel sorry for them?

“It’s funny, y’know.” He continues. “I think for the first time, I’m tired of fighting you, of pressing you. And it seems like you finally want to fight back. So against our natures.” 

He has a point. There’s some part of me that wants to keep fighting him, that almost convinces me that if we get our grievances out through our fists, we’ll have some level of catharsis. Maybe even some level of understanding each other.

“So what do you suggest we do about it?” I say, attempting to appeal to his problem solving proclivities. Either way, I’m tired of feeling this way. I just want it to be done, for us to be at peace.

“I just want us to understand each other.”

I don’t know what it is about that thought, but something hits me. Every snarky remark he’s made, every undercutting comment, every instance of questioning my actions, all of it disappears under that statement

I just want us to understand each other.

It’s never been about what I do wrong. It’s always been about what he can do, too. Does he just have a weird way of phrasing it, then?

I finally pushed on this, but a bit softer this time. “You say this, and I get you but…” I pause to let it sit with him before continuing, “...why does it feel like you hate me when you bring up how you can do it better? I feel like you undermine me at every turn.”

“It feels like that, huh? When we’re so tied to the reason why we do something, it feels like not doing that action is an insult to our personalities. When I say move on and explore your boundaries, you say play it safe. When I say stop ruminating, you say we need to learn as many lessons as possible.” He walks over to the bench, hands in his pocket, looking at me softly. His expression strained, but he looks like he’s really trying. 

“But why not just phrase it in a way that expresses how you feel, without blaming me?” I say bluntly, and look up at him.

In a small silence, I await his response.

“Because…when I criticize myself, I feel the need to criticize you. And that feels motivating.” He gives a half baked awkward smile. Combined with his trying so hard not to look angry, it just looks so goofy that-

“Pshuhah ahahahaha!” I break out into a chuckle, then a full laugh. He looks taken aback, raising an eyebrow. “Wh-what!?” He exclaims, feeling insulted.

“You’re really trying, huh?” I say, letting out a few more chuckles. I put my arm on the bench, beckoning him to sit down next to me.

“You’re usually the emotive one. You know I don’t do anything but be stoic.” He says, so unconvincingly. He can’t really expect me to believe that.

“We literally labeled you Red because you get angry and serious. That’s like, the opposite of stoic.” I say as I roll my eyes and remind him of when we started compartmentalizing our emotions when it came to us. We were always two halves of a whole, always two approaches to problems, always two responses to the trauma.

I don’t know when it first happened. Out of a traumatic experience, or maybe a way to make sense of the world, or ourselves, when we felt so chaotic in our mixed feelings when we were younger. But, at some point, we became Red and Blue. 

He crosses his arms. I look off into the distance. The tree behind us lies still. I try to take the moment in, appreciating that we’re simply next to each other. I almost forget the preceding events before I say something about it.

“I’m…sorry.” I finally get the words out as I glance back at him. He snaps his neck at me, a look of shock immediately takes over him.

“For making you feel like you had to keep revisiting those memories. For making you feel like you weren’t heard.” I say, as I think I understand why he did those things. All of it lies in explanations, but I still feel like it was somewhat unjustified.

“I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I never do. It’s just…” His voice trails off. He actually sounds somber, I almost couldn’t believe it. The anger that overtook him in our previous debacle is now gone.

“Then why?” I ask, almost accusatory now. 

“Like I said, it gets me going. To really focus on how to be better. To motivate me, so we don’t feel shitty again, so we can look at the past and think, this can’t happen again. So I thought, maybe it’ll get him going too.” It’s an incredibly loaded statement, but he finally answers one of my questions instead of debating the question’s existence. It’s as if he hates our actions so much, he must hate himself because of it. And that hate has to go somewhere else, right?

It no longer feels like he clashes with me, but instead takes my offer up on playing along.

“Because you feel motivated by knowing we don’t have to feel lonely, to feel anxious, to have our backs to the wall.” I say, trying to summarize what he says for myself. 

“Yeah, sorta.” He responds.

“Well, isn’t that like what I’m doing? Putting it into words, into art, for others to see, to feel inspired by?” I try to justify how this all started in the first place. 

“Mmmm…I guess I can see it. But I know it makes me feel like we’re spending too long in the past. Even if I try to remind you of it, I try to move on. To show you it could’ve been different” He says.

“Yeah, it could have been. But it wasn’t. And those exact situations won’t pop up again. We don’t know what’s gonna be thrown our way in the future.” I responded.

“Sure…” He sees my logic, and his voice falters a bit, as if he’s reflecting, too. “But…but we can be better right? It’s still something we can learn from.”

Maybe I see a bit of hypocrisy in both of our logic. By focusing on the past, we think we’re doing better in the future. But if we spend so long of the present in the past, then that becomes our future. Despite it being different approaches to the same problem, it’s a cycle of obsession on constant self-improvement. It’s–

I think back to a comment I said before. Good damage…good damage…good damage…

“It’ll never be good, huh? It’s just…damage.” I say intuitively, as the words rattle around in my head. 

He senses that thought in my head and says, “That’s what I’ve been saying!” He raises his head in excitement.

My automatic response was to feel insulted, as if his discovery was meant as an aside to me. But I remind myself that he’s learning this stuff too, as I am. I try to take a deep breath in to calm my nerves.

I think he notices this, and says “Sorry, did I say something wrong?”

“I think…I feel frustrated when you don’t communicate exactly what you’re looking for. It’s always saying something as a means to an end, instead of just saying what you’re feeling and what you want.” I say, as I take a few more deep breaths in. I feel the cold metal of the bench beneath me, the still air around us, the grass against my feet. 

He knows I’m grounding myself, so he stays silent for a bit now.

“I think that I don’t even know why I’m saying what I’m saying sometimes. I just know that I hate what we’re doing, when we’re doing it.” He says, seemingly practicing what I’ve suggested right at this moment.

I sat with his response. I guess it makes sense that I’m the one more in tune with how we’re feeling. He doesn’t see that first, he sees action first, his compulsion is doing, not processing.

A thought pops up in my head.

“What if we do both?” I raise this question to him, feeling inspired. I don’t know what that looks like but I do want to see his answer.

“What do you mean?” He asks for more clarification.

“You look to what we can do better, to learn as much as we can. I look to process it all, to share it, so I can feel seen in others, so I can feel validated. You feel validation and affirmation through simply being better. I seek it through simply knowing I can do better.” I try my best to recap our dispositions, to capture the essence of Red and Blue, without focusing too much on the flaws of each side.

But he seems to do so: “But then hate takes over, we hate ourselves when we can’t be better. When we can’t do right by ourselves. We hate ourselves when we can’t put words to it all, unable to share, unable to process.” He says. I know he’s right. There's this intensity of expectation I think we have that serves as a premise to each of our patterns. We do what we do thinking that it always has to and will lead to a better outcome.

But that’s not always going to be true.

The thought hits both of our heads as we whirl our heads around to each other’s, locking eyes. The sharp catharsis of the thought is replaced by the fact that we thought of this together, that we have proof that we’re in sync.

I almost start crying, and he reaches over to put my head on his shoulder. I scooch over, realizing this comfort is all I have ever sought. Why have I never sought it in myself? Why am I so inclined to hate myself that I can’t even turn inward to ask myself to say I’m okay?

“Put those thoughts away, for now. Shame won’t get us anywhere.” He says in response to me, as if hearing my head voice these concerns. As if responding yet again to my anxiety.

“Maybe…maybe next time. We just…share how we’re feeling, not in an attempt to do better, but to just talk about it. No more thinking that we’re at fault, no more thinking immediately that we have to grow from this. Any of it is just damage, and we take it case by case.” He soothes me, still focusing on how we can do better in the future. Hah. If I wasn’t so overwhelmed by our emotions, I would’ve laughed at the irony.

“Can we still write about it? Can we share it?” I seek permission now. I don’t want to, but I know that we both have to be okay with it before we move forward.

“Yeah, most of the time. But can we just sit with something if it gets to be too much first? Maybe we can talk about it before we decide what to do.” He seeks to make conversation first. I don’t deny this suggestion. 

I lay my hands on the bench we’re sitting on. Maybe we should’ve just sat on the bench before. Maybe it was our mind telling us to take a beat.

We sit in silence again. For the first time, we felt in tune with each other. Even if we were feeling differently, at least we were talking about it this time.

“Okay, get off me.” He says as he pushes my head up off his shoulder. Aha. He never had a huge penchant for physical comfort. I understand it though.

“So…what now?” I ask. I don’t mean to push it now, but…

His eyebrows furrow, thinking to himself. He eventually responds. “I want to revisit those memories. I think I still feel conflicted about them.”

But I’m so tired. I think to myself. 

No. Yes, actually. I am tired, but…this is a real chance at trying to understand each other. So maybe I hold this, tell him this, and still try, even if it feels like I’m slow or bad at it. It’s okay to keep doing. To keep acting. 

“Can we get some sleep, first?” I say, thinking back to how this started. I wonder what time it is now, having probably been asleep for so long.

“OH yeah. Yeah.” He says, after the realization hit him too. Maybe he’s tired too.

I get up from the bench and look behind us, admiring the tree. It looks less slumped over now, and a few of the branches have extended out. There’s some more leaves growing, but it’s still struggling.

…

I shock awake, pushing the covers away from my arms and lifting my head up. Augh. A vertigo hits my head from getting up too fast. I try to make sense of everything – the bed, covers below me, pillows shifted about, and my clock on the floor, face up. It reads 10:23 am. 

I missed my first class. I think to myself. I look around the room, not seeing Red anymore. Just me. Maybe I should go back to sleep. Maybe I need to write about this. Maybe I need to try and talk to them again. Maybe…

Grruruuughhhh. My stomach rumbles deep in my gut, reminiscent of a hollow cave with a monster deep inside. Sheesh.

One thing at a time, Aman. One thing at a time.