A Supernova

By: Virginia Li

I’m emotional.

I’d like to say I’m good with my feelings because I’m expressive, I’m confrontational, I’m empathetic. I talk to my friends about how I feel regularly. I choose to be open, to be vulnerable, to be sensitive. I consider myself in touch with my emotions. I write.

But when it comes to you, when it comes to feeling the way you make me feel, I can’t say or write a word. I tell my friends that I like you, but I don’t say what or how I feel exactly. Sometimes I choose to say nothing because I feel dumb for even wanting to express my feelings, but sometimes because there are no right words. When it’s the latter, I can’t form my thoughts into words, and I hate myself for it. Is it possible to know how I feel, yet not?

I feel ridiculous, I feel vulnerable, and I hate it because it’s not by choice. So when I told you how I felt, how anxious you make me feel, when I affirmed my tendency to overthink and overcomplicate, I was really trying to say how much I like you and how much I don’t want to mess this up. With you, I feel like I’m about to burst, and in the best possible way, but also in a way that makes me feel strange, in a way that makes me feel like everything could be so wrong but if you were there to talk to me about it, then it would become right. That it would become okay. And I haven’t felt like that in a long time.

This probably sounds stupid, and I know I’m writing dramatically, but this is the only way I know how to write because I want to make up for the seconds that I spent blabbering and blubbering, covering up how much I actually like you and pretending that I could move on soon enough. I couldn’t look at you when I told you how I felt, and when you looked at me, I looked away. You wanted me to be honest, and I didn’t want to cry.

I am embarrassed, I am afraid, I don’t want to feel this way anymore, I want to run away, maybe into your arms, maybe away from you, but definitely away from the world. I wanted to ask if I could just hold your hand, put my head on your shoulder, cry a bit, pat your back, forget your name, forget you, forget the way you make me feel. Because you make me feel things, not in the way that my best friends make me feel, with a soft, glowing warmth in my heart, but in a way that makes everything in me glow.

This is not the soft, unending flicker of a candle. This is a light, a spectacle, a supernova, one that burns in my eyes, in my brain, blazes in my chest, and I can’t help it if I feel that way about you. I can’t help it if you don’t feel that way about me. So I’ll learn to put out these fires, so when I see you, I’ll smile, having forgotten about how I feel– how I felt. Perhaps I’ll just remember something else.

VL