Instructions for Moving

How To Wait:

Place both feet firmly on the floor in front of the subway entrance. Feel the earth beneath you holding the everyday things that turn the days above it. Exhale the muttered, bitter remark that would itch if left inside about how much longer is the damn train going to take.
As you do this try to notice the shape and weight of your frustrations. Are they large? Are they insurmountable? Are they awesome and impossible? Will you be o.k?
It can be a saddening thought, but try to see the solace and comfort of your own miniscule place within the universe. The building where you work will still be there in ten, twenty minutes.
Think of all the minutes you saved by not waiting for a table that one time.
Did you do something with them?
Are they a compact, rubbery trinket forgotten in some corner of your room? Take a deep breath. Let your presence fill the shape around you. Let your actions infiltrate the ripples of time that came before and after.

How to Feel Alone:

For the feeling to be fully fledged it is imperative you place yourself for prolonged amounts of time in strange environments.
Loneliness, the kind that sticks to the skin like cold air on an early winter day, is only exhaled by the nostrils of strangers.
Loneliness has to be felt in medium sized rooms. Look for restaurants, events, conferences where you don’t feel so different. Push yourself into spaces where your language flows freely or where your way of walking is the common denominator. Let the waves of familiarity galvanize all the rough edges that strangeness has created on you. Feel yourself relapse into the familiar crimes and misdemeanors that are appropriate within your people. For a while things will feel good, great, wonderful. Breathing will come easy and uninterrupted. Something you´ve come to understand as a rarity and a gift.
And then,
As the faces of people around you become more clear–faces made handsomer simply by being rare–think about going back.
You are no longer the dweller of a single place. The thought of that inevitable return to the foreign (your foreign, other people´s home) will claw its way from your kidneys. It will reach your lungs and heart and throat. Push the flavorless tears back and breathe deep.
Start warming up your tongue again for the continuous effort of constructing a personality for them: your friends who you resemble nothing at all. Understand there is little of this experience that will make it across the desert of language with enough shine to be relevant in conversation.
Leave the room feeling the pain of sore, worked out muscles clinging to your eyes.
The feeling can come and go. It can flare up or lay down in unexpected circumstances, but it will always be with you.
This is loneliness.

How To Sharpen Knives:

Experts recommend sharpening knives at room temperature. Somewhere warm enough that a scarf is an eccentricity, but not so cold that the heart rate lowers and the whole world acquires a menacing blue tinge.
Hold the knife in question against direct sunlight to make sure the ridges and crooks that pushed into the sharp side of the blade are still there. Bring the knife with you everywhere and wait for the right moment for sharpening. The moment, like life, like taxes, like bed bugs, will present itself.
A creeping bitterness springs somewhere in the back of the throat and it will indicate the moment. You will notice, more, the people around you. Their tongues that flow more freely than yours, but restricted by a lack of inspiration that bothers you. You will feel the edges of your body sharpen. The snarky humour that has risen inside fades into a soft panic as their eyes, even their scalps that produce such different hair from yours, become more numerous.
At this point you must begin to wonder about choices made, by you, by history, by your parents. You will notice how the hands around you move so differently from your and for such different purposes. A hand will play with what it found inside a nose: stretching the substance out before smearing it on a dirty jacket. A man in a corner mumbles incoherent thoughts to himself in a language you understand but they are inflamed with the danger of unpredictability.
The edges should now be ready. Gleaming and sharp, clear.
Run the blade of the knife along the outsides of your knees or elbows. Hips, waist, and throat are good too. Repeat the motion more than three times but never more than fifteen.
Hold the knife once again against a source of light  to make sure it has been sharpened to your satisfaction.
Return the knife to its appropriate drawer.
The knife will become dull again in around six weeks or however long it takes to replenish the tank of about-home tears.
Dull out your own edges after the procedure. Life is not sustainable otherwise.

—

Daniela Serrano is an editor, writer, and translator. She has worked in publishing in Colombia and Boston. She has previously written about books and literature among other things for Bustle, Electric Lit, The Millions, and the Ploughshares blog.