Sans titre

If I had no notion of the billions of lives happening right at this moment

Then, I might carry the weight of loneliness better.

There are things things that are very obvious to anyone when it comes to abuse (no matter how minute) during childhood. Everybody gets it when you say that you had a hard time knowing how to approach the parent or parents who were responsible for the abuse. Nobody will dare contradict you when you suggest that even to this day your relationships are tainted by those early experiences. People will silently accept it if you find yourself telling them that you don't know how to handle physical touch because of the abuse you went through, they might even offer a sympathetic smile, a pat on the back, a hug to make you feel better, make you feel heard or just so that they can tell themselves that they didn't let you alone in this moment of vulnerability.

But how are you to tell them that beyond all the memories you never had the opportunity to make because your mother guarded the door and your every interaction with the outside world as if relinquishing any of the authority she had were an impossible task, there are memories that got stolen. Memories that have been buried under the rubble of a broken early life. Never to be found again. I mean is there even anyone looking for them? You certainly are not. How could you when you're petrified by the idea of remembering anything? What if you could no longer look them in the eye because you recall all those times you tiptoed around them in your home too afraid to set them off or to be a burden to them in any way? All those times you saw in their eyes that they despised you for being there, for being the way you are. The silent seconds that ticked by after the last slap to the face or her heavy breathing after she hurled the last shoe, fork, spoon, chair your way. But worse of all is the nagging feeling that perhaps all of this is in your head, that there is nothing to uncover because nothing got lost; just twisted and amplified by the reeling mind of a lonely child. Then what? There would be a whole life to rewrite, amends to make, things to clarify and how mortifying would that be? Not even being able to trust yourself to remember your life accurately.

[...]

"Do you want me to, uh, call someone to be with you or...? Booth asked, risking a glance to the passenger side.

-No, I'm fine...alone." Quiet sobs raked through her body and tears kept coming. She had known that this could not end well; them, together. It could never work, she had told him that much last year but here she was, crying in his car after foolishly acting on impulse...and yet, it had not felt foolish -it had felt right.

The car had come to a halt and Booth cleared his throat not knowing what to do. He was always the one making things easy between them but after her declaration he found himself at his wits' end. He could only hope that just like him she would find a way to keep going in a world where her love was unrequited and that eventually she, too, would find someone to share her life with. Just not him. He could not bring himself to look her in the eyes so he got out of the car and rounded it to open her door. Looking anywhere but at Booth, Temperance slowly slid out of her seat. And here they were; standing face to face on the curb in front of Brennan's house, neither one of them daring to look the other in the eyes. She was the first to interrupt the laden silence.

"I guess I should go. Thank you Booth -for believing me...about Lauren's death.

-Bones..." he muttered although he had no idea what he was going to say next. She had started making her way to her building but at the sound of her nickname she turned around and finally their eyes met. They both stared, lost in thought. Booth could still see the sheen of unhushed tears in her eyes, he could tell she was fighting a new onslaught of tears and he felt strangely untethered. It was not right, it was not fair. A year ago he would have been the man she needed, he had begged her to let him be that man! They would have been good together, more than good.

For years he had believed that them meeting had to be fate, the miracle that put love on his path -now he saw that this was fate, two souls never getting to each other at the right time, bound to miss each other. He loved Hannah, he could see himself having a future with her, here in D.C -her with her work at the White House and him at the FBI working with Bones and the squints... That's the life he wanted.

"I'm sorry, I really am, he trailed off.

-Goodbye Booth..."

She turned her back to him and willed her feet to keep moving. The rain had not let up and she was now soaked to the bone. She did not turn around and he did not stop her. This was really it. She had tried, it would appear she had read the signals all wrong.

Once she crossed the threshold of her house the enormity of it all finally hit her. She expected more tears because surely this meant that their partnership was compromised but nothing came and she was surrounded by the silence of her home. Her gaze trailed over the many artifacts littered all over her apartment, the hundreds and hundreds of books. This was her house; the museum of an impersonal life. She had always been alone so why did it feel different now? It was absurd to think that one could be alone in different ways, either you are alone or you are not and Temperance Brennan was definitely alone, that much had been true before this case, before Booth. She wished she could just go back in time to the days of oblivious loneliness, when she had no real inkling as to what she was missing out on. Damn Booth! Damn him for making her world so messy, so irrational!

Suddenly sadness made way for anger. She had been a fool and now she was paying the price, no doubt she would do so for a long time. What had she expected? For him to leave Hannah and take a chance on a relationship with a woman who had to be faced with the image of an empty life which led to a silent death to finally come to grips with feelings she had harbored for years? He was too fluent in the elusive language of emotions to belong with her in any way.

Even in the sadness induced haziness she could feel that there was something wrong with that statement but she simply did not have the heart to think about it.

She sluggishly got ready for what was undoubtedly about to be a restless night and somewhere between the moment she had removed her shoes and the process of drying of her hair the tears had started back. She did no try to stop them. She would let it all out tonight and then... Well, there was no way for her to infer what Booth would do after the debacle of this night but as far as she was concerned nothing really had to change. She would adapt, she believed there was such a thing as evolution so she would give herself time to evolve, to become a version of herself that did not yearn for the love of her partner, a woman who lived for her job and did not let herself get sidetracked by fragile ties to others. Or maybe she could go back to the Maluku Islands... Angela would be upset, Cam as well no doubt and Booth...evidently she could not trust her intuitions when it came to him so perhaps he would be relieved to see her go; that way they had no reason to face this head on day after day, case after case. And so the hours passed and she kept oscillating between those two options. By the time the sun had risen she was no closer to a decision, her eyes felt swollen from all the crying and her chest felt raw although she knew that it could not possibly from a broken heart, simply a mental state making itself known physically and tiredness getting to her body.

She could not stay in place anymore so she got ready and took off for the lab where she would work, hopefully dulling the ache of Booth's rejection.

The simple act of being in the lab, a place where she knew she belonged seemed to alleviate some of the anguish she felt. This had been an excellent idea. Before she reached the platform Micah appeared out of nowhere -as was his habit.

"How'd it work out? he asked, his trademark benevolent smile fixed on his face.

- I listened to the universe... I felt something. she chuckled, I feel sad.

- That's so much better than dead, or even dead inside."

This made her smile slightly; he was right, at least she had not been run over by that car last night, that had to count for something.

"You heard that in a lecture? she asked somehow soothed by their conversation.

- I got my own story Dr. Brennan. Just like you, just like everybody else... I got my own sad story."

She pondered over this for a while and when she came back to her senses Micah was gone, no doubt she would see him again later in the day. She made a beeline for her office intending to put the Lauren Eams case to rest and find some other task to throw herself into head first. The file was strewn open on her desk, she took a deep breath, bracing herself. Temperance picked up the photograph that had knocked her world off its axis and saw things clearly for the first time since the beginning of this whole ordeal.

"Three days, she whispered to herself. Three days for the world to turn right side up again."

Everything was supposed to be back to normal now but she was still sad and painfully aware of how alone she was. So this was the new normal huh? She hated that just like she could now see Lauren's face for what it truly was she could not make herself forget about the feelings she had excavated from the depth of herself last night. Perhaps such was the price of a renewed life in the world right side up: clarity. Her life had not changed, not in its core but now her eyes saw more clearly what it had chosen to ignore up until then. She was not Dr. Lauren Eams, she was alive, she loved Booth,he loved Hannah. Those were the facts. She could live with those facts and soon she would get over it -he had gotten over her. She would give herself seven months and then...well, she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

This might sound like some conceited, girl boss type of affirmation that just leads you to believe that you are an incompetent human being for not adhering to this idea that life is but a mound of clay that you have the power to mold into whatever you want. But no; I am choosing to accept that the world changes, that I am part of this world whether I like it or not and so I cannot escape change. It might sound innocent enough but to know that I have the power to get up and move alongside the rest of the world is a concept that is slowly changing me.

For a very long time -or at least for what seems like a very long time to a 21 year old- I was in situations where my hands were bound and all I could do was exist in this environment where I was being controlled and I feel like the time has come for this to change. Lately, sadness has been taking the lead in my life, dragging me further and further away from myself, from my friends, from my family, hurting me in ways it had never done before and I am only starting to understand that at any given time I could change that reality, that I don't have to turn the other cheek every time. As things stand it seems to me that all of this is but a symptom of the last shreds of my childhood being gingerly peeled away from me at long last. Childhood means very little to me, and yet I know that it refers to something different for me than for most of my friends who have been boldly and loudly claiming their independence from this obsolete time of their lives for quite some time now. If I have been more reserved concerning this dissociation I reckon it has to do with the fact that to me childhood does not reside in playtime and innocent friendships or clumsy self discovery -none of which I quite remember- but more so in the anxiety of existing against my will, of having my existence being so tightly bound to my mother's. For as long as i (can) remember my mother has been the force making my world go round, each of her choices shaping me as a person, each of her words etching themselves somewhere deep inside of me -so deep in fact that i thought they made me the person I was when in reality I was before her words touched me and i will remain after the last one of them will. There is something within that is untainted by the world and by her words or at least that is what I am choosing to believe. I am choosing to change.

Recently, I have found myself listening or reading other people's thoughts about happiness and sadness and this idea of being present and one particular take has stayed with me and has managed to irrevocably make me see life through a new lens; this woman was commenting on the on-going discussion about the difference between distraction and happiness saying and I quote "I sit blindly in sadness all the time, why can't I sit blindly in joy?" arguing that distraction and happiness are the same thing most of the time and i could not agree more. What are books, movies, songs etc if not commodified happiness? We are all trying to buy ourselves little increments of time where distraction is louder than existential dread. Or at least that's what i am doing. And so I distract myself... but that is neither new nor always effective; sometimes sadness gets through the cracks and it seems to deaden everything, smothering the tiny sparks of joy one had worked so hard to ignite. I distract myself and sometimes sadness gets through but in the same way that happiness does not actually change the world -only the way I see it and the way I exist in it- sadness does not either. But more than that, I am of the belief that life is made of nuances and differences so i want to welcome sadness just like i would joy but not how I have been doing it for the past decade, that is to say as a close friend that I had missed cause they had left me alone in a room full of strangers. I don't wanna see joy, anger, frustration, mirth, excitement as threatening strangers anymore.

I have managed to move several thousand miles away from the only place i had known for the first twenty years of my life, putting an entire ocean and continent between my family and I and yet I still struggle to leave the comfort of the relationship I have entertained with apathy and sadness behind...Still, I deserve to try, I choose to try and be better to myself everyday.. even on days when this bone deep lethargy fueled by fear of the future, fear of the unknown and of failure has me in the palm of its hand. No longer am I satisfied with the small windows of time those feelings allow me to have to be myself with the people I care about. I am trying to convince myself that I am done with the life of reclusion and anguish I have built myself over the years. It is not easy, I am a creature of habit and I do believe that by nature I am more sensible, more prone to negative passions but somewhere in there there is a happier, more optimistic version of myself and I am sure that there is a place for that person in the outside world as well. I deserve to try. I am choosing to believe in change.

I recently saw a tiktok in which a woman talked about a podcast she had listened to about the cultutre of casual sex and its roots in internalised misogyny and it really got me thinking... so I guess here are my thoughts:

I don’t have much sexual experience -I reckon I should start with that if anyone is to read this- but over the years the lines that I have drawn for myslef have changed and in turn changed my views on sex in general. Indeed for the longest time I just never saw myself as pretty or attractive enough to keep the attention of anyone and certainly not pretty enough to provoke sexual attraction. This is no longer the case but in its stead another worry has taken root in my mind: if i don’t wish to be in a relationship to have sex does that mean that all I am to expect is “meaningles sex”?

This is the question which brings me to the subject at hand i.e. casual sex culture and what it means especially for women as it is what I identify as. Too often I think we equate liberation with the internalisation and reproduction of behaviours which were, up until that point, reserved to the dominating group -here men-. This to me is a grave mistake that will only lead us all to partake and perpetuate a flawed version of society.

So my questions are: why does casual sex have to be meaningless? Why remove any sort of emotion to this part of our lives in the name of being casual? And why do emotions in this particular context are always associated with women? To whom does this idea truly profit?

I have long viewed my body and myself as worthless and something that could be disposed of carelessly, this is a view that belongs to past me and now I wonder why I should think that letting anyone this near to me, in such an intimate manner is a meaningless thing. I would like to belive that we are all the sum of the people we meet and of the things they do to/for/with us and tell us, so to me this idea that sex could mean nothing is kind of upsetting (?). Even if it is only for sexual satisfaction sex means something and I do belive that it is easier to have mediocre sexual experiences when both sides feel bound to silence as to not freak out the other person or persons with too much information that could be misconstruded as an open door to romantic feelings or a monogamous relationship or whatever it is that people want to avoid when seeking casual sex. I should probably say that I don’t wish to shame anyone with this I’m just genuinenly curious and open to conversation and this is just a thought dump.