Keir

Keir
n. An ill-fated attempt to reenact a beloved memory years later, returning to a place that once felt like home, only to find it now feels uncannily off, like walking through a wax museum of your own childhood. Dutch kier, fissure or narrow opening, as the midpoint of an hourglass.

Sometimes you think about ending things, contemplating its practicality like evaluating a foreign concept; then you tell yourself you just don’t want to move forward in time anymore.

“Let’s keep it as ‘a see you again,’” they said.

Words lying in your notes app never made it into the journal. Songs you crawl back to finally wore that one line out. Screenshots begin to haunt you in your feed: on this day. You did not want to and never believed in erasing; it is for losers who cry at 3 am. Deleting is admitting that you lost.

It’s ridiculous that not all platforms have archives already.

You started every conversation with, “Can I tell you something?” You never really answered your own question; not until the intensities have expired, many days and nights later.

People probably started to talk about heaven and the afterlife not because they wonder about the big questions of where we are all going and what is beyond all this. Rather, it’s simply easier to have a next stop, a place to physicalize all the next-times and what-ifs. You first thought about these hypotheticals because persuading yourself that was farewell is a little bit unbearable. Then you felt stupid; the world is bigger than you and your weakness.

It got to the point where the ups and downs were too tiring. It seemed even more stupid to spend time getting worse and better and worse again.

You cling to the idea that you’ll be able to smile at all this at some point. As of now, the most you’re doing is praying that today will be a good day before stepping out of the door.

You still want to be happy, of course you do. And you know you can be. It just sucks that all the good parts that you keep going back to start to taste a bit diluted, and the harder you try to grasp them, the more details seem to blur and morph. How exactly did you say it? How exactly did I say it?

The farewell is not a decision anyone gets to make; it already happened, in a bodily, absolute, skin-to-skin manner, when you are yanked out of the cocoon of that world, now a past reality.

At the moment, you’re already aware that whatever comes with it, whatever lingers afterwards, is worth savoring. It is not a thrilling realization, but it is beautiful how that juncture turns itself into something so colossal and autonomous.

You relish every note of the misery as much as you desperately anticipate it to end. You are conscious of the ephemerality of that twitch in the heartbeat, the hollowing out of everything inside, and you try your best not to abuse the past moments too much that these flinches fleet away.

And you can’t wait to arrive on the other side.

Then it was finally your turn to say miss you too instead of miss you. It’s a privilege, an abuse of power, a little reward for your little journey.

You don’t mean it anymore, and you mourn the end of it, for yourself.