A Life Running Parallel

Walking on the avenue, I duck the wet drops of whatever ungodly liquid leaks from the EL train above. The ground shakes as the giant heap of metal roars overhead, so loud you’d never know if an earthquake was happening at the same time. The screech of the brakes pierces the air, loud enough to drown out my own thoughts. Beneath the bridge, sound ricochets off concrete, an echo chamber of relentless noise.

I pick up my pace to escape the cold, darkness—longer strides, breath quickening—until I reach the light at the end of the tunnel. The border where shadow gives way to the sun feels monumental. Stepping into warmth is like crossing a finish line. Day and night. One reality abandoned in search of another. The next opportune moment. Anything had to be better than this.

After all these years in this black hole of a city, there are still things you never get used to. The noise is one of them—actually, several of them. The train is bad, but worse are the ambulance sirens slicing through the air. EMTs racing towards the overdoses, almost hourly. Cars honking. Crashes. People yelling. Helicopters pulsing overhead. Most would assume the occasional gunshots would top the list, but it really doesn’t anymore. Familiarity dulls even fear.

The streets teach you quickly: toughen up, harden your skin. They expose you to life’s most unsavory endings. Over time, you become desensitized to things that would traumatize normal people. But that has apparently slipped away too. I told myself I'd never let the badlands turn my heart cold, or make me bitter. I don't think I've allowed it to fully, but it inevitably chips away at you day after day of this neverending nightmare of a life, if you can even call it that anymore. This was certainly no way to live. It wasn't. It's survival...

I have been searching for something I cannot name. Not lost—but always just beyond reach. Like a faint song playing somewhere in the distance. I feel it in the quiet moments, in the hum beneath my thoughts, in the tightening of my chest when I imagine a life that feels truer than the one I’m standing in.

I thought it was a place. Then a person. Then a future that somehow slipped past me without asking permission.

I chased it however I could—anything to reach another state of mind. Anything to escape the constant replay of that night, like a broken record of tragedy. I begged the images to disappear from my mind, the way the rest of my life had. All that remained was the memory of who I used to be. Who I was meant to become. The highest version of myself and all the potential squandered in the blink of an eye.

Gone. Like my boyfriend.

The catalyst of everything that followed.

I still don’t know which loss was worse: the love of my life, or the version of me that died with him. It felt like torture in slow motion—watching every failed attempt to revive him. Clothes cut away. His body exposed. Lifeless. Lips turning blue.

Charge.

One, two, three.

Charge.

One, two, three.

The third time was not the charm.

They stopped.

“Call it.”

Time of death: 1:08 a.m.

The room emptied. Chaos dissolved into stillness. The silence was deafening—so quiet my ears rang. Disbelief. Surreal. It happened so fast I never had time to process it, let alone grieve.

So I didn’t.

Apparently, my lack of reaction made me “302-able.” A 72-hour hold. As if isolation could teach me how to feel. I had nothing but time and forced solitude—now required to sit with thoughts I didn’t know how to touch.

When I was released, I still didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I only knew something was missing. I felt hollow. Blank.

The realization doesn’t fix me. It doesn’t rewind time or resurrect the dead. But it steadies me, just enough to stand still without running. Lost in a haze.

I tried to grieve “correctly.” I really did.

Denial? There was no denying I had lost him. Lost myself. Lost my joy.

Bargaining? For what—resurrection?

Anger? At him for overdosing? At God for taking him? At myself for every choice that led us here?

I didn’t even have the energy for anger. Or sadness. Or tears.

Nothing.

Which somehow made me feel even more broken.

So I buried her—the woman I used to be. With every suppressed emotion, she faded further into the distance. How do you retrieve remnants of a former self once you’ve abandoned her to survive?

Years passed in a strange contradiction—flying by and crawling at the same time. One year became two. Two became three. Seven plus years later, I was still here. Still unresolved. Still untouched by proper grief.

I hadn’t grown—just aged. Lines etched deeper into my face, now frozen into a permanent frown. A body that felt frail, lifeless, drained of any life force, and shaped by trauma & pain. A forced smile that didn’t quite align. So I masked that too, along with the burden of misery and hopelessness.

It wasn’t just the grief I carried—it was embarrassment. I avoided looking in mirrors because I couldn't recognize who was staring back at me. But I felt exposed. Like I had to cover the shame written all over my face. I couldn't even trick myself to smile in the mirror long enough to recite my affirmations. Who was I kidding? I yearned to be able to convince myself I could positive self talk my way to become a renewed version. To pull myself out of this quicksand. To make the move once and for all to change, to step into the unknown, to face my fears and just do it. Return to the real world, do normal things like normal people. Why does it seem like such a struggle?? As if everyone else had received a manual on how to move forward, but of course I’d misplaced mine.

I tortured myself with the incessant doom scrolling - watching the people I went to high school with, building fulfilling lives in real time. Post after post of the rewarding careers, happy families, bright futures, while I stayed suspended, applauding milestones I couldn’t imagine reaching. I wanted to be happy for them. Sometimes I was. Sometimes I just felt envious of where they are in life. I'm supposed to be right in line with all of them. But Instead it fills me with regret and resentment, and it all just makes me tired....the truest and cruelest definition of FOMO.

Time had been stolen, and yet I remained, standing here for reasons I didn’t understand. The mere thought of all that would be required to even begin fixing myself was crippling. The overwhelm stopped me in my tracks. And here we go again, the stuck mentality returns.

What terrified me most wasn’t staying broken—it was the possibility that healing might require hope again. Wanting something meant risking disappointment. So I learned to want quietly, cautiously, almost in secret. So that way when the disappointment struck again, it wasn't announced to the world. I would only be letting myself down, no one else...

Numbing to avoid the pain, cutting off tears before they could fall. I told myself it was strength. It was a lie. All I was doing was storing pressure. Building toward an inevitable collapse.

I was escaping reality, and in doing so, I lost even more of myself.

Still, the yearning grew. It wasn’t gentle. It burned.

A constant pull toward something unseen—like another current of life running parallel to this one. Close enough to feel, distant enough to ache. Like the EL train passing overhead every fifteen minutes, reminding me of who I no longer was.

I look up at the square windows speeding by and, for a moment, I see us—sitting side by side. Young. Reckless. Blissfully unaware of what awaited us. Riding nowhere, convinced that was enough.

And finally, I understand:

I was never meant to reach what I was searching for.

I was meant to become it.