Creative Nonfiction: Everyone is Falling Apart

By Caroline Huckeba

 

This is a hard time to be a young person. Sometimes I feel embarrassed admitting that because every generation believes they are living through the end of something, but this does not feel like the adult life I was promised as a child. I thought adulthood would feel solid. I thought there would be dinner parties and crowded apartments and friends who knocked on each other’s doors without texting first. I thought there would be certainty. Instead there is disassociation. There is the strange sensation of watching your own life through glass. There is waking up every morning to a world that feels both unbearably public and deeply lonely.

 

We all need connection, though most days it feels like no one knows how to ask for it anymore.

 

Today I walked through the rain in a long black skirt and a black rain jacket, looking like something that tried to pull Hercules into the underworld. Beneath the sleeve covering my arm was the small prick from my tuberculosis screening for a job where I am regularly bitten by children. Sometimes adulthood feels less like becoming and more like enduring small humiliations quietly. Everyone carrying around private evidence that they are trying very hard to survive.

 

Yesterday, on a walk, I saw a girl I used to play clarinet with when we were twelve. She walked past me quickly with the same upright gait she had when we were twelve, as if time had only changed the size of her body and not the shape of her spirit. I almost said hello, but she kept moving. Afterwards I wondered: when does saying hello expire? Two years? Five? Seven? At what point does shared history become irrelevant enough to pass each other in silence?

 

Maybe that is part of what feels so unbearable right now. Everyone seems to be falling apart privately while performing composure publicly. Online we appear self-involved because the internet has turned every human experience into a presentation of the self. Even grief becomes branding eventually. Wellness becomes performance. Friendship becomes maintenance. Personality becomes content. And yet I do not actually think people care less about each other than they used to. I think people are starving for each other. I think we have simply forgotten how to approach one another without fear of inconvenience.

 

I am twenty-three and I think about myself all day too. I worry about my future and my body and whether I am wasting my life and whether I am secretly becoming a bad person through passivity. I disappear into myself constantly. But I am still here for you. I think most people would be, if asked directly enough. I think beneath all this performance and distance there is still an animal desire to sit beside another person and say: I know. Me too.

 

So maybe finding a beautiful life in a world falling apart is not about becoming untouched by despair. Maybe it is smaller than that. Maybe it is refusing to let your tenderness rot into irony. Maybe it is believing that saying hello has not expired yet.

 

 

 

 

 

Caroline Huckeba is a writer and master’s student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Her work has appeared in Roe Magazine, Blood+Honey, Minetta Review, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Texas, where she’s usually reading, looking for cats, or writing for her independent publication, Stories on the Side.