My Liberation Notes

A handful of wet, grey gravel has settled right behind my ribs, occupying the space where the air is supposed to go. I think there are stones in my chest. Let''s not call it an anxiety attack; that implies a temporary storm, a sudden spike in the pulse that clears out by morning. This is static. It is a mass of cold, unyielding mineral sitting dead center in the ribcage, whole and low.

Is it sadness? Is it loneliness? Is it a hybrid species of both, or is it absolutely nothing at all—just a hollow vacuum that forgot how to hold air? I don''t know if a body can live with this specific architecture inside it. I don''t know if it leaves room to make love, or if another person''s skin can ever penetrate deep enough to touch the stone. There is simply no space left to create an opening.

The strange thing is the timing. It doesn''t hit me when I watch couples moving through the city, or when I see people exchange those small, relatable digital reels that summarize intimacy in fifteen seconds. I already know human connection is not my place; I cleared myself off that board long ago.

Instead, the vacuum opens up when the external world is perfectly still. It arrives all at once when the weather is cozy, when it rains outside with no humidity, or late at night in December when the room grows narrow and you can hear the distant, metallic whistle of the trains cutting through the dark. It waits for the days that are legally mandated to matter—my birthday, special occasions—dropping its weight precisely when the calendar demands a presence.

It climbs up through the speakers when I listen to Adrianne Lenker sing forward beckon rebound, or when I sit in the dark watching Pride and Prejudice for the hundredth time, chasing a hopeless romantic trope that feels like an alien script. It breathes down my neck when I rewatch My Liberation Notes for the hundredth time. There is that moment where the character is searching for something to make her whole, and her situationship turns to her and asks: "Did you ever make anyone feel whole?"

That question is a physical weight. I used to think I was just waiting. Waiting for the perfect narrative, the ideal configuration of a person who would arrive and magically release this insane sadness from my bones. But that fictional savior demands a terrifying math: Can I make someone feel whole? And if my own interior is nothing but stone and empty shelves, why should another human being have to navigate the vacuum of me?

So the emptiness follows me into the daylight. I sit in a crowded university classroom, surrounded by thirty voices and the shifting of desks, and the air between us feels entirely dead. I am a ghost taking notes. Late at night, I play The Younger Days by the Korean band Sanullim, the melody drifting like old smoke, tracking a youth that feels like it belongs to a stranger. Even the daily chemical routine—the antidepressants meant to smooth out the jagged edges—cannot dissolve the solid, heavy thing sitting on my chest. It is an insane loneliness. A twenty-something isolation that makes me think, in the quietest hours, that perhaps I am simply undeserving of the basic human currency everyone else exchanges so easily.