When Space is Swelling
I’ve been thinking about “space” a lot and what it means in the context of our lives, our personal understandings, and our capacity to hold onto it for both ourselves and for others. It seems so vacant yet at times it also feels like it’s swelling up like a balloon not quite sure how to stop itself from inhaling and is on the verge of implosion. Yes, sometimes it feels like we have too much of it that it suffocates us rather than breathing air and freedom into our lungs. I think about how I perceive it now, with what I’ve gone through, am going through, and what I’ve needed from it in times of exhaustion, desperation, reflection, growth.
Space has become this fluid thing in my life and I’m on this fluctuating relationship with it, neither good nor bad, just floating along. It’s given me deep clarity into my thoughts and feelings, although, not definitively but rather expansively. Like laying out the laundry to dry so it soaks up the natural sun and breeze, as you watch it take form on its own, not certain of how it’ll settle. It’s trust, really. And patience. Lots of it.
Anyways, the following pieces (or poems?) are mini vignettes of my personal narratives with “space”—- deeply inquisitive ponderings of the way it takes itself up in my life, entered with or without my choice, but inevitably planted itself. I’m learning how to accept space as an avenue of growth all on its own. The more I define my relationship with it, the more I can hold onto it as further room to grow.
I.
The thing about space is that it feels like freedom
Until you realize it also feels like emptiness
Subsumed by feelings of quiet lost
Of lack
Of an otherness not quite yours
I used to think space was physical positioning
Like the way we cram ourselves into overcrowded subway cars
Or covertly placing ourselves near our longtime crush
Distant but aware
Our bodies marking our measurements apart
But space is now distancing
A noun turned verb when being far once meant being alone
And our souls desired solitary escape
Now it’s yearning for closeness, not just in our bodily understanding
But in the way we crave electricity in each other’s magnetic energies
Veering close enough to feel wavelengths
And wade together in the darkness
III.
Tell her love is space
Allowing each other’s shifts and growths take place in their entireties
Yet still dancing in each other’s orbits
Spacious and plentiful and whole
Sharing this space with you is like swimming in its ebb and flows together
Expanding and rising when the tides converse concurrently
Drifting us afloat and abound and abundantly
But it will also drown us whole when we aren’t looking
Its open vastness so uncertain and unknown that we panic in the infinity
And cling onto space as an emergency exit for ourselves
Rather than making more of it for each other
There’s so much of it, overflowing and limitless
There’s enough for us both and much, much more
Love is space, yes
But it is also holding space for one other
Not holding it against each other
V.
A space between.
A lot of times, I never know in between what.
Never here nor there
Not too far but not that near
This space supposedly defined by lands unknown to me
Yet are meant to feel like a places I’ve lived in before
Like a beginning and an end where I set up home in between
& Other Stories dress found at Crossroads Trading // Monrow sweater via Rent the Runway
Photography by Apneet
II.
“I think we need space,” he said like the final punctuation to two hours of yelling hollowed words at each other, desperate to turn dull ends to sharp knives aggressively provoking one another. Space. That’s how he wanted to end our two-year on-and-off relationship with one empty word of blanketed blankness. And in that moment, I thought, how could a term shaped by invisibility, of immeasurable nothingness, hurt more than the jagged words thrown at my eyes right now. How could an empty carcass of language fill me up with such anger and deceit and betrayal?
We need space. As if we were too broke to afford love anymore. Like all the air we pushed aside to close the distance between us so we could get closer and closer to each other suddenly vacuumed itself back into our lives and unwound the string that had held us together. Like our love had forgotten to live and was suddenly desperate for breaths and we were in its way of one long sigh of relief. We suffocated each other of every piece of air owed to us. We bartered our space for intimacy when we only received the cheap version of it. The plasticity of it.
We need space. No, you don’t need space. You need love. And maybe that was my first mistake in filling this void.
IV.
Hold space with your bare hands
Embrace the air wound tightly around your fingertips
Spiraling your caressing touch with a gossamer thread
Remember how it felt when you stroked your soul
And told her it will be okay
It will always be okay
Sometimes better, if not always
Remember that warmth you felt by its invisible eye
Under the soft landing of a limitless sky
Drifting into a space continuum
Once upon a time, emptiness was pain
A void too vast to fill and you couldn’t fill it
Where did all the light go?
How do you collect all this air?
Until you find yourself making a bed
Out of the invisible velvet skin
Thick and warm and raw
Suddenly space is the marrow
Swimming deep in your bones and you can’t get enough of it
You’ll never have enough of it
But you’ll always want more of it
It wasn’t emptiness that caused you pain
It was the all the times you told yourself
Space was what will you protect you
As you found yourself floating further from the truth
As you found yourself all alone in the clouds
