Try as I Might

I think I have only been alive for approximately ten weeks of my life.

Ten weeks full of bliss. Ten weeks of living in Elsewhere Cities.

During those ten weeks, I was never pressured to be anyone else. I never had to perform. All of my suppressed selves existed without fear, restraint, or hesitance. There was no need to create a façade to blend in, to be accepted by the mass, to be normal. My quirks, my wants, my needs never slipped into the cracks forgotten into the abyss titled unimportant and irrelevant. No other period in my life has ever seen me being myself the most than those weeks. Everything that was deemed weird, distasteful, different about me was accepted without questions or judgement or prejudice; even if everything that I was screamed foreign.

Because I was. But I was not perceived and labeled as something foreign. No prejudice or preconceived notion of my personality and how I was supposed to behave. No script to be received and followed. Nothing to perform. Regardless of how alien the taste of my name on their tongue, I was only Nadilla. No other descriptor but my own name. Not even my upbringing—familial, societal, religious, or any other expository—was taken into consideration.

I think I have only been alive for approximately ten weeks of my life.

My life has never been mine except during those weeks. I was conditioned to lend myself to everyone. All my resources from my mental competency to emotional capacity—even my wants and my needs—has always been outsourced to everyone else. What is left on my trembling hands can only be defined as echoes of emptiness forever greedily desire whatever that could be claim as mine.

I have always thought that living in Elsewhere Cities would finally make me feel whole—would make me feel me. I think I got it wrong all along. I think all I have ever wanted was come home to myself, wherever she is. I think all I want is just to be myself without having to exhaust myself in performing and giving.

All I can ever do is just grieve over her, wherever she is. Because try as I might, I could never come back to myself permanently.