This is me holding. The fuck. On.

This is 15th of Jan. I am leaving Riga on a bus for Vilnius. I woke up with food poisoning and spent the morning vomiting my guts out and crawling on the floor.

I really considered staying another night and re-booking everything and just getting the rest, that would probably have been the best thing to do but it felt like too big of a task and I don’t know, for some reason I decided I would do the one hour walk, the three hour wait, the four hour bus ride. This is not the first time I’ve done something like this, I reminded myself. (No, and last time you were 18 and that is to this day one of your worst experiences and also you were not alone, I also remembered…)

So yeah, I did it. Though I’m usually pretty proud of my stubborn side, it isn’t always pretty. I spent almost two hours locked in a toilet stall at the Riga bus station. At that point, I didn’t really care. It was quite calm, relatively clean. I was happy for the small things: the toilet had a lid on which I could sit, and hooks on which I could put my bag and my jacket. I rested my head on my backpack and listened to people coming and going. I didn’t even count the minutes. I set an alarm. Then breathed.

I managed to get myself on the bus, and thankfully the seat next to mine was empty so I could collapse the meatbag onto it. I had really been looking forward to seeing the flat Latvian and Lithuanian landscapes pass by in the grey January light. Now all I could do was to keep my eyes closed and take deep breaths and not throw up. I managed. I held on. Somewhere in the midst of this suffering and the back and forth between sleep and wakefulness on the bus I went to this existential place. I always do, especially when there’s vomiting involved. I had covered my face and the lights were low and it was dark outside, and I cried quietly, I mean I ugly-cried like a baby but sneakily, over just how perfect it all was. Yes. How the whole organism is fighting to purge this poison and to heal, like that is the only choice there is without ever asking. It is resisting change, yet changing everything to allow that resistance. I thought of my parents and the grief over my fucked up childhood and I cried great tears of joy and I thought: “it was perfect!” I thought of my most recent heartbreak and all the pain in that, and I thought “thank god!” Not because of the “all of that led me here”-bullcrap, which is of course also true, but just because I get to be here. Alive. The time I have here as an organism is so fucking short. But I get to have this, right now. And isn’t that something! And so I cried and I smiled and I was in pain and I went back to sleep, woke up and cried again, changed positions and slept. All the way to Vilnius.

The rest of the story is quite short. I get off the bus and it’s rainy and rough. An older man is worried about me and wants to know if I have to go far, and if someone is meeting me. It is beautiful. I do the 16 minute walk in 30. The sweetest man welcomes me to the hostel and after hearing my status (“I need only two things: a bed and a toilet, please.”), he checks me in at record speed. The bed, a shower, my woolen socks and sweater – heaven. In sickness I shrink down to my broken components, in this case the stomach. Everything revolves around the discomfort and pain. I need to think of my hands or my knees to remember that they’re still there or they don’t excist, not to mention the room around me, the past or the future. In a way it is good. It allows me to make peace.

The last thing I did before going to bed was to light a candle and send a message to my friend. It has been three years now since her son passed away. The message itself is longer, but these three last phrases I would say to anyone, everyone, and myself. It is a prayer, or a mantra, or a spell if you will. Because even if we struggle, we only get to do so for a short time. 

I’m happy you’re in my life.
I’m happy you excist.
I love you.

…

(This story told in pictures.)