I have resigned from keeping this as a monthly practice, so I’ve changed the diary titles from their date of submission to simply an increasing number: a way to divide time not in convenient and homogeneous fractions, but instead by a simple feeling of life passing as it does. Some months feel infinite and others are gone in a second. It’s an excellent excuse for my inconsistency.

The past few months have been like a mountain skyline and now, after passing through some beautiful hills, I have arrived to a strange swamp. The feelings of discomfort are many, but if you look close enough at the still water, you see there is so much that is screaming at the top of its lungs “I am alive!”, just like the process of decomposition. Somehow I feel like that. After years of fighting against different degrees of what can be best described as depression, the feeling I’ve felt in the past one has been of finally reaching for air after being underwater for too long, of finally the fog dissipating and seeing the rain and the sun and the wind. My lungs aren’t fit anymore, and my eyes are too sensitive to the light sometimes, but it’s beautiful to be back.

Because of this, the past winter has been so hard: I have felt, even if in the comfort of my heated home, like a plant struggling to reach for light and to get the water out of an icy soil. There is beauty in accepting the fact that we, as part of a frozen biome, feel the same desperation that I imagine birds might feel, because without the sun life on this planet would be nothing and so here we are accepting this dependence to this god that exists out of chaos. How can one feel all of these enormous feelings while taking public transports because it’s snowing too much to bike? My head is attached to the planetary body and to my body at the same time, and to everything in between and above and below.

This was winter for me, a contradiction of feelings that made perfect sense. As I regained my sense of identity after a period of having lost it, an identity I always felt so strongly attached to, my only bastion in a reality made out of gas. As I smashed my head against some walls that probably aren’t as long nor tall as I think, like a fly flying against to the glass of an open window again and again and again and again and against. As I was there, for the first time in years, maybe since I was a child, maybe I can’t trust my memory enough to say since when, I realised that I felt alive, with all the consequences that this meant. The absolute, maddening fear of feeling pleasure and pain not only in the extremes, but also in the smaller valleys and hills of every day life.

The absolute beauty of watching a candle for a few minutes as it rains, of crocheting something because I suddenly feel like it, of crying at a movie, of celebrating a friend, and celebrating myself in all of these little daily actions. If I re-think of my life in the past years it feels so trivial and normal, while if I re-think of it in terms of growth and feelings and pain, it feels like an acid trip. Time stretches out and shrinks, everything becomes symbols like drawing a tarot card and seeing your father in the face of the Popess.

The absolute beauty of being on a dance floor and existing in the movement of your body, in the sweat expelled by your armpits and your neck, in the whimsical interactions with other humans in a moment where it’s not important to know each other’s past or ethical values, but to just sniff at each other’s butts and realising that for a moment love can be unconditional and that we can play together.

All of this in the sadness of today, a day of friendship, tears and laughters, and in the balance I feel in the fact that this feeling is not all encompassing. In embracing the contradiction that being alive means. Hurting, proud, angry, happy, sad.

Alive.