Feels Like the First Time

I have a habit of speaking like the beginning of a Charles Dickens novel.

example: "This is the worst day!" or "This is the best dinner I've ever had!" Someone once pointed out that using words like "best" and "worst" means that things get better and better and worse and worse ... to infinity.

[and he roughly illustrated this graph with a hand gesture]

I think he was trying to point out the dangers of talking in hyperbole but, the thing is, I do kind of feel that way. I know it seems crazy but most of the time the way I experience anything feels new and uncharted.

My boyfriend, Eli, calls this "fresh out of the womb syndrome". I treat everything as if it's the first time I've experienced it. Its makes it impossible to drive with me in the car because I like to exclaim "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT" at wildflowers and chipmunks in a way that is usually reserved for u.f.o sightings or multicar accidents. Some people believe that maturity is being able to maintain a balance in life; to be constantly undulating between staggering highs and lows isn't healthy. But, life isn't one of those things that gets easier with practice. The more we live the harder it gets because our well of experience, of joy and pain, keeps growing. Every time I feel something it is new because it's the cumulative of all the times I've felt that feeling before.When I get sad I'm not only sad for that particular reason, but a kind of sad that is felt by a heart already full of tiny holes. I'm not sorry that I experience life this way. Even if every crisis feels like the one I can't handle, it makes every gift feel like saving grace. Maybe normalcy isn't about maintaining the middle ground but becoming maximally happy and maximally sad in equal parts, so that their weight and leverage is the same, and you stay centered, hanging in the balance.