Do you know that feeling that swells up in your chest, and it kind of feels like gas, but it’s an emotional gas? Isn’t that a terrible metaphor? Simile. What the fuck ever. It’s the feeling when you want to feel something, but you don’t know what, and you can’t do it. So you listen to the same song forty-five times because it gets you so close, and you end up scrolling through thirty-five pages of fanfiction and spending half an hour changing the search terms, and you don’t read any of it because you don’t know what emotion you’re even looking to feel, and sometimes it isn’t even an emotion at all. Sometimes it’s a specific story you want to read, only it doesn’t exist, or if it does, nobody’s written it, and so you open your YouTube recommendations feed, and it’s just, like, a movie trailer and six video essays and a video of six guys playing cards against humanity, and that’s not what you fucking want, you want that feeling. It’s the feeling when you’re in a movie, and the characters smile at each other, but they don’t kiss, and they’re probably, like, gay or something because otherwise Hollywood would have them kiss, and so they don’t kiss but they just look at each other, and it settles in your chest and curls there, and you don’t cry, exactly, because it isn’t sad, or happy, it’s just something there that you don’t know and you can’t control and fuck if it doesn’t hurt like pulling teeth. Or the feeling at the end of a story where they win but everyone dies anyways—

Untitled

Visual by Clara Lynas