I know how you feel. I understand.

How many people have said that to you? How many of them actually mean it, without any implicit meanings of I-know-it-all and I-have-been-through-so-much-more-than-you-so-shut-the-fuck-up patronizing arrogance?

I know. What do I know? This is what I know.

I know how it feels like to be all alone in this world. I have been there. I have been among the noises of voices that seems warm to the ears but doesn’t feel warm at all. I have been touched and stroked and caressed and hugged like a small puppy on display, without feeling any love or comfort at all.

I know how it feels like to cry alone, in various locked rooms, in dark empty places, in public toilets with the cheap rough toilet paper scratching your cheeks as you try to silence yourself, try to drown all evidences of your sad sordid existence so that everything, every pathetic and desperate feeling, every fat ugly tear of misery, goes down in one single flush.

I know how it feels like to live in contradiction. To yearn for somebody to reach out to you, a voice, strong enough, yet gentle enough, to draw you in, while at the same time, placing physical and invisible barriers and padlocks all around you as you pray very hard that somehow, someone will pass the test- Your test. But you know no one will, because it never ends. You won’t let them come close enough to hurt you. You can’t lose. It takes courage, courage you can never seem to muster, to lose, to trust, and to let go, of you, and of the people who have killed you over and over again. Oh how cliché, to say, that you have been hurt before, and how true too, to say, that you are afraid, that you are unable to step out of your comfort zone, so much so that you talk yourself out of the things that you want so badly to have.

I know how it feels like destroy and to heal yourself in private. No one will taste your tears and your blood and your trembling skin the way you do.

I know how it feels like to have something to say, yet each time to find that you are unable to say it. I know how it feels like to try to breach the gap, to walk back and forth in the grey areas hoping that someone out there might comprehend your ambiguities and mind games for what they really are- What are they?

I could go on. I know how it feels like to ramble, to try to explain yourself without really explaining anything at all. I know how it feels like to be misunderstood, to be confused, to want to die while trying to find a reason to live, to love, to hate, to run away... I could go on or we could just forget it. So what? What's the point? But perhaps somewhere along the lines, you might have realized that we are human, you and I, burningly alive. There must be a reason why we are still alive. Don’t you think? I refuse to be a cruel joke. I will not tell you that everything will be okay. I will tell you that I want everything to be okay.

The irony is that no one will truly know how you feel, word for word, emotion for emotion.

Yet maybe in our own little ways, in varying degrees, with different languages to account for it, we have been to the same frightening places and the same heavenly places and back, to utter enough sincerity in the words, “I know how you feel. I understand.”