459: Grey

459: Grey

Listless, dry, unwavering…going insane. Unsure of the future, wishing I were younger, wishing I had never left my home city, sleeping away the days hoping for something to look forward to. Not having anyone accept me beyond the weird, lonely body that I am for more than a fleeting day or week in my life. Preferring to be lost in wildly meaningless dreams that have me chasing something or something chasing me. That when I feel more alive in dreams than in life, the universe is gifting a realisation I am yet to make. Perhaps I have already made that realisation, and I am in denial.

 

 

~Serendipitous

458: The Politics of Love

458: The Politics of Love

O let me forget how boring and difficult the politics of love are, how tiring and complex the dance is to fall in love and stay in love.

How can I love others when I have difficulty loving myself? I can barely take care of myself; how can others expect me to take care of them? It is a difficult facade to weave and hold. I’m tired and I don’t want to see anyone. Whenever did I become an introverted recluse? I cannot necessarily pinpoint the exact moment in time; perhaps during exam period, or realising that I have taken too many tokens of affection and felt nothing, no pleasure in taking, no pleasure in giving. I feel alive only when I am at my saddest, deeply reflecting, yearning for spontaneous coffee dates, watching the water by the pier in the warm darkness. I miss what I want, but cannot have.

Are promises of love I already have what I truly want? If I am even asking this question, why do I bother holding onto them if I don’t want what I have? Am I cursed to never be completely satisfied, always holding out for something better, wanting the greener grass on the other side?

I’m terribly afraid of rejecting and being rejected. Although I am more used to being the rejected, the dejected, all sorts of things. I am tired of playing a game where the outcome is a definite win or loss for me. Where I was once the pleasure seeker, the thrill seeker, pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle, I wish for some peace in this difficult life. It seems impossible.

I feel so dead inside. I’d like to feel alive again, but have no idea how. I seem to be missing something in my life. I am still pining for the past. I find it hard to find what is missing from all that I have experienced and known, although I have a vague idea of what it could be. The finish line never seems to be in sight, just check points that I can’t necessarily save at.

I’m tired of searching for what I don’t have, but deeply crave very much. I try not to do it so much that it wears me out, but being involved in the politics of love exhausts me. Relationships are so much hard work, even more so with someone I don’t care about as much as myself.

I guess I should say no.

 

~ Serendipitous

457: Hiatus

457: Hiatus

If I had been told, maybe around graduation 243 days ago, that I wouldn’t make it into dental school (for now) and would be suffering with possible depression in a foreign city surrounded simultaneously by beauty and horror…

I probably would have cried. I know I was frustrated when I didn’t make it into any, but found out I made oral health school purely because the scores required for it were so low. So I moved cities and lost my support network, had to rebuild a new one, albeit unsuccessfully, and am studying something I love. But I am trying again for dental school, with the thought in mind that I will probably be even more depressed, but hey, what gives, this is my dream career.

I realise my last post was in January, on January 5, two days before I nearly died of alcohol poisoning at a stranger’s house. I had a stormy, complicated romance of sorts for three months before I was forced to give it up due to new complications such as moving cities and realising I had fallen in love on the last day we met. Yikes. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about everything that has happened since my last exam of high school. Looking back on my blog, it’s almost like I’ve missed so much of my own life. Not to mention that I’ve had about a hundred new throwaway email followers (my inbox is full of them). I really wish I would just close this blog and study for my finals (that are in less than two weeks), but right now, I just feel so depressed and feel the need to reflect.

I miss the summer. Summer is my favourite season. The last three summers have been incredibly memorable. Summer of 2015 was mostly spent scrolling endlessly on Vine, watching looping memes that had sound. Summer of 2016 was mostly spent poring over lines of classical Latin when I was not seeing my ex, and when I was not poring over Latin, I was going on dates, sightseeing in my own city with someone I loved very much (although now I barely remember any of those dates, just the one where we were walking in the park and on the tip of my tongue was, “I want to break up”, seemingly out of nowhere, and I wish we broke up in that park right then and there because the pain dragged on unnecessarily for about four months). Summer of 2017, best summer of my life thus far. Going out six days out of seven, inadvertently checking to dos off my post-HSC bucket list that I had written maybe a year or two in advance and added to occasionally. I made new friends. I saw new people. I…had the most whirlwind, most complicated of relationships, as far as casual relationships would go, as far as I had gone with casual relationships. Truthfully at the time, I was not exactly new to the dating scene. I was very sociable, in need of contact and communication with all kinds of people. I recall feeling lonely and unwanted if I did not have the chance to be extroverted. In the summer, he was so great that I wanted to write a whole blog post about him. I can only imagine that it would have been so blinded by love, by an impossible possibility that I am actually sort of glad that I didn’t write it, because I knew what I was getting myself into at the start of that summer.

That summer, I had very little reason, if any, to be sad or depressed. High school was over, I was going to uni, whatever. I was pretty disappointed to see that I didn’t make dental school, but I kind of knew it was going to happen and that one way or another, I would get in some other time. Maybe next year, maybe in three years, who knows. I was quite disgruntled that I had not fallen in love with anyone, as I enjoyed and relished that feeling so much in the summer before. I chose to move to a city that was about ninety minutes away from my home city so that I could attend oral health school.

Goodness me, I guess that’s where the depression began. Leaving behind my old life, my friends, my family. This was the plan all along, but some days, more often than not now, I regret that I didn’t stay back to do some shitty degree. It turned out that I was the youngest in my degree (I was eighteen at the time, but now I’m nineteen! Wow, my blog missed my nineteenth)…and my closest friend right now is about a decade older than me. So I pretty much have no friends my age except my online friend that I have now met in real life quite frequently. Expresso depresso…

The city itself is nice. There is a great nightlife (yes to staying out until 5am), awesome drinks (hello 7-standard zombie cocktail) and pretty good food, I’d say. However, I live about thirty minutes away by train from the heart of all things exciting and I am living in the equivalent of…I shouldn’t say. Terribly flat roads, you have to have a car to get around.

The freedom of living alone is fantastic but burdening. I have so much more responsibility for myself now, and some days I enjoy it, other days I resent it. I love what I’m studying, but knowing that I won’t get to study endodontics (which feels like my passion) is a bummer.

I think I’m trying to summarise everything now, so maybe I will detail everything slowly in future posts when I get around to them, maybe after exams. I haven’t written in a journal or anything creative since the summer because I’ve been so busy studying and trying to feel normal even though I know most of the big adults in my course still look down on me as a baby that graduated high school and barely knows anything about the real world. I don’t miss high school, but I do miss being around people my age.

 

~ Serendipitous

456: Wander (SOC)

456: Wander (SOC)

A human. Many humans. Earphones in. Tonight I feel like an album made for slow dancing, and honestly, I don’t normally listen to this album unless I’m alone or feeling the need for alone time. I sit in this once brimming mall area, watching the deciduous leaves of thin branches sway with the persuasion of the evening zephyr. I watch the rotating white mannequins, donned in the latest trends, and in watching them, I think of my not so recent ex, whom I broke up with some odd eight or so months ago. His habitual expenditures, expensively cheap tastes and insatiable impulsiveness when it came to bargains or sales. He probably still checks OzBargains daily like clockwork. I think of him, and I miss him, all his flaws, our memories together, the good and the bad. Now it feels good to not have to answer to anybody, to spend more time with friends old and new, to think for myself only. Yet there is still a lingering feeling of emptiness, like I want more of something that has only been present in my life for less than a year.

Being in love. Really in love, having fallen so deeply in love that it becomes a trap, your trap. He is the first thing on your mind when you wake up, and the last thing before you go to sleep. You think of him even more, having ran into him unknowingly a few days ago. His face, all the same. He doesn’t seem to have grown in height. His eyes looking at anything but not you, but cleverly focused away, as if he had not seen you before you saw him. You think of the boy who acknowledged you through a simple nod that late November, early December – for the life of you, you cannot remember; perhaps you have blocked the memory – before he returned your diaries, perhaps never opened to be read. After all, the day you gave them to him, the day you gave him a little part of the younger you, he concealed them behind an unused shelf. Or so the story goes in your mind. His face, his eyes, his smile. He really was the whole deal and it was your fault that it ended. Or perhaps neither party was at fault, but you still feel responsible. An aftermath, the lingering memory cells that remind you of once overthinking and manipulating so many scenarios in your head that it overwhelmed you. Your grasp on the relationship, the memories start to fade the more you try to hold on them, and the songs change. Now you remember yourself in the throes of depression, clinging onto a crumbling illusion in which you had unsuccessfully, yet emotionally, invested. The slow dances in the dead of night in a low lit kitchen with a lover, they come back to simultaneously kiss and bite you, a painful memory of past nostalgia and unbridled naivety, something you have since desperately tried to rein in as the summer starts to ebb and stagnate. You forget about all the past for maybe a few minutes and your eyes start to wander the streets. How beautiful the lights are, the nightlife…how could you ever turn your back on a city that made you? The corporate offices with their brightly lit cubicles, a world you may never find yourself in. You cast a few looks behind your shoulder, taking careful note of the abandoned bike on the footpath. Its twisted red frame, and you turn your head over some angles to better adjust the image before your eyes. Maybe if one squinted, its outline would represent that of an injured individual curled up in a foetal position, frozen in time. The lost memories and livelihood of this outline shakes you, and you stop looking back towards it. You turn a corner and think to yourself, I have not seen a single drunk person on the streets tonight, yet it is a Friday night. Perhaps you are on the quieter side of the city. You pass a bar playing live jazz or country – the notes confuse and bemuse you – and you observe middle aged men and women clustered together, nursing drinks you most likely have not yet had the privilege of tasting. It is time to refrain from engaging in heavy drinking, staying sober, being the best version of yourself without the haze of alcoholism to guide your loosened tongue and limbs. Today you have discovered the terrifying beauty that is hot coffee, enabling you to run on the odd few hours of sleep for the whole day. It bothers you that you could spend up to thirty dollars a week on coffee, so you make a mental note to convince your dad that now you are an adult and can take on responsibilities, it is only fair that he teach you how to operate a coffee machine. The sea of fatigue and exhaustion seems to set in as you sit on the bus, recording your memories, your feelings. You are so thankful for the privilege of sight, sound, taste, movement, smell.

How empowering it is to be young, but how wasteful it is to enjoy it without the preservation of the moment.

 

~Serendipitous

455: It Has Been So Long

455: It Has Been So Long

It has been so long since I wrote something for my blog. It’s almost like I abandoned it. But I have to keep to my quota of at least 5 posts a month. Even more of them next year, but still. So here it is. Even though I am writing on my phone, and not really thinking about what I would normally write if I had been sitting down in a “romantic” place.

The posts become more and more intermittent, and with each new one once in a while, they deteriorate more in quality. I feel sorry for myself that my writing skills may have dulled a little, but my ability to make new memories and preserve them with photos, stories, dreams…they are still as sharp as the first day I set up this blog.

One day I hope to write a book. I am trying to follow the train of thought that came before this, but one day I hope to write a book that is a culmination of my experiences, of the human experience, a celebration of human lives, our lives, all unavoidably intertwined with each other. I want to preserve the experience, the privilege, the power of our five senses that we take for granted everyday (yes, I know we have more than five, but I’ve always written with the main five in mind). I want to preserve every memory, the joy, the happiness, the melancholia, the pain, the phantasmagoric realisation of how simultaneous the presence of mundanity and beauty in our lives is, how gorgeously romantic yet grossly misunderstood and misrepresented our own memories and nostalgia can be to others. I keep speaking of a novel, but how can I be writing a novel if all I do is work in the daytime and party when the sun sets? It is difficult to say. Inspiration comes and goes. Perhaps the most difficult thing to say is that I have, in a way, almost forgotten about my desire to write. I feel the shame in me rise to extraordinary heights, the self-beration, the spiritual self-flagellation, for how could a torn and lost soul misplace the need for preservation, the need to be heard, the need to be read, the need to be beautifully appreciated in an almost bemused yet serene way? Although now that I have finally admitted to myself my wrongdoings both in writing and in thought, I only feel but a lingering residue of remorse. One day they will, no, we will technologically advance to the point that we can have a dictaphone for our thoughts, a private dictaphone for which we can record and play back these endless streams of consciousness, save the potential blockbusters, groundbreaking bestsellers, tap into wells of creativity that have-more often than not- dried up with forgetfulness. One day I’ll be able to stop forgetting my dreams while I’m awake, recall them in perfect clarity rather than reciting summaries of summaries, rather than reducing these cinematic motions to nothing more than a few shaky frames, rather than letting thick cobwebs of fallibility shroud them in forever lost archives in the endless recesses of my mind. One day, one day…I think this, I walk home in the semi-dark, thinking of typing the words as they come to me, instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity to sit down and let the creativity flow, because there is never a perfect opportunity, just as there is never the perfect moment to break up, just as you can never be fully ready for what is to come, but ready enough. Walking, thinking, bus rides, train rides, they will be my “ready enough” times. The next time I unknowingly board a train of thought, I’ll run with it. Up and down the corridors, cross each car, bump into strangers, mutter empty apologies under my breath, chase the words as I think them, as they pop into my brain, as they run away from me as soon as they appear.

Now I listen to the crickets chirp, the breeze blow gently, my slow music, walk slowly home, about two minutes away if I continue at this pace, and I feel this insanely lucid rush of creativity stagnate just a little, a car rushes past, it is the eve of the eve of New Year’s Eve, when I cross the road in about twenty seconds, the magic will be lost, the Fantasia that plays in my ears and my mind, no cars come by now, the street is quiet except for my footfalls and the crickets. Now I am five seconds from home, and the magic dies as I exhale. When I look up from my screen, it’s as if I teleported here, having not caught a bus or train home, or whatever it was. Like I’ve been in a trance, and must return to the obligations that occupy my life when I do not pursue the hedonistic lifestyle…

~ Serendipitous