Meeting the love of my life!
At a meagre age of 18 it sounds really immature for me to proclaim that but I still attest to it. I say this because I think I’ve reached maturity rather early on in my life.
I got diagnosed with depression when I was 6 after trying to kill myself (yes, at 6 years old). I had highly nihilistic views and everything was bleak since I could remember. My mom called me a realist and didn’t see it as depression; or perhaps she just refused to accept it.
Since then, I’ve tried to kill myself at least 3-4 times, got put in a hospital for a week once for that in 2016. For the entirety of 2017 it was rather odd because I moved on up into pre-u and I got a feeling many people knew about what I went through so I wasn’t really embarrassed about it. I think it’s a side effect of depression of sorts, where one just stops giving a fuck about anything. Anyway, in 2017 it was a blur I went through the motion and every few weeks suicidal thoughts would come and go. I resorted to unhealthy coping mechanisms to literally make myself feel something I guess.
Wasn’t until the start of 2018 where I met him and I think it was the first time I felt genuinely happy. I didn’t know that it was possible to feel that happy. He brought me out of my comfort zone and treated me not with pity like how everyone else would but just as a normal person. He taught me how to see everything in a different way and never rushed me to get out of this ‘funk’. When I’m having my lows he just will be quiet and accompany me to do nothing and we both just do our own thing. It’s really like he knows me inside out.
My fondest memory of us thus far, is the day we decided to spontaneously order two large Dominos pizzas. We collected our pizzas and walked around the estate and neighbourhood looking for somewhere to sit down and eat. We found this cozy mosaic table and stools and ate and just watched passers-by. Later on, we found those rental bikes by the side of the road and hopped on and cycled and zipped through the housing estates. We didn’t really care about the cars driving to and fro along the road; everything was so exhilarating. We cycled past many houses and that’s when I remember him saying the weirdest thing.
“Wanna go see a house with flamingoes?”
So yeah, we did just that. We cycled to the house with flamingoes in their backyard. We got closer to the fence and peeped through and saw two to three pink flamingoes waltzing along the green grass of the garden. And we just stayed there for a while, with our child-like wonder, looking at those weird birds. I couldn’t believe it. This guy has flamingoes in his backyard!
Coming back to the main point, this guy taught me to see colour again in everything I experience, in everything that I had previously lost interest in and taught me how to enjoy anything that I’d face. It hasn’t been easy for me or for him as I really can be irritable and manic and it’s tiring for him to handle the emotional rollercoaster. And now, I am digressing. But yeah, that’s what it is for me. If I’d been so short-sighted and blatantly went to the extreme, I’d not have learnt to love or learnt what it meant to be happy in a somewhat crappy world we live in.