Dear Diary, we sat together today

Dear Diary,

I let myself cry today, I let myself feel my feelings.

I view the concept to be perhaps a step above previous attempts where I merely sat with my feelings. We would awkwardly look at one another, sitting an arm's distance apart, knees almost touching while crossed legged as children on a carpet. Did they want to reach out? Did they want a hug? Or did they just wish to sit like me, acknowledge my presence and silently sit? Answerless questions never asked out of my fear to give them any more attention. Simply sitting with them was agony enough. The emotions hidden beneath their skin exuded a burning prickly heat like that of a seatbelt catching hours of sunlight on an Australian summer’s day.

Today was different. Today we sat facing one another. They were no longer in my peripheral vision. Like looking in a mirror I watched them as they trembled. My body felt like it was harbouring a hive of disturbed bees. My blood buzzed as it cycled through my body, I felt restless, agitated. Muddy brown eyes meet mine. "Are you sad?" I ask them, to which they nod, shyly looking down as the embarrassment squiggles in their centre. I feel silly. Another young girl shakes her head. She is not sad, she is angry, or perhaps troubled? None of them know why, at least not consciously enough to express. I peer at them all again and sigh. “I can do this” I say as I muster the courage to continue.

I clear my desk and make space for my art diary and Micador pastels. Tracing the curved corners of my purple earbud case I connect the bluetooth on my phone and open up Spotify. “Songs for crying” is what I type on my touchscreen. I hit shuffle and closed my eyes, slipping into the arch of Mila’s ever so slightly like being dunked into holy water.

The buzzing flows across the arches, pooling in one spot for a moment. She opens her eyes and begins to mouth the words to a song on the playlist. As she continues her mouth begins to tremble and tears start to fall. She’s thinking of him, it’s a song about lost love and change. I can feel the lyrics creating wispy tendrils and attaching to her nerves. Someone stokes her hand as I rock back and forth, my foot bouncing to the beat of the music. She misses him. I miss him. I can feel her pain rolling down my cheeks. I do not stop her. I just sit and let her feel. The tendrils push the tears over and out of my eyes and flow through my fingers that grip my oil pastels. I am not thinking about what I am drawing, I am just scrawling shapes. She picks out colour after colour, making scribbles on the paper, often taking a moment to smudge them across one another. As the music shifts, often so does she. The shapes change as they each connect tendrils to new songs. Whatever the tune, the thought of him never strays. They each rarely get to feel this, at least not in this way.

Part of me smiles, this is nice. I like this. Flowing through the waves and embracing them one by one.