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

454: Alcohol Ballad (Part I)

454: Alcohol Ballad (Part I)

This is just a small look into my world,
A time in my world when my toes curled
At the burn of alc down my throat
and man, the alc rocked my world like a goddamn boat

So here’s a small look here,
Just before we say cheers

—

Good girls waited ’til they were eighteen
To try the celebrated poison drink
Or if they couldn’t wait they would try them unseen,
Giggle with each other in every clink

In the early days we would mix soj with beer
Add a fair amount of Sprite
Just to ease our fear
Before we chugged and began to feel light-
headed

Stumble up (or was it down?) to the bathroom
Eager to clear away our impending doom
Splash our face with some cold water
Grab the edge of the sink before we falter
Laugh obnoxiously and loudly,
And smile in the mirror proudly.

Stumble back down (or was it up?) the stairs
Fall back clumsy back into one o’ the chairs
With blazed eyes raise a shot glass,
All the people before you, lookin’ like a farce

And you say, one more shot!
Clink, down the glass, feel hot,
Your throat burns, chest taut,
And you’re beginning to feel
Like that boy feeding you the bottle
Is looking like someone you’d wanna throttle

But the restaurant is no place for drunken behaviour RIGHT?
Oh honey take a look at the plight
You’re in with this fella
Best bet his girl’s name ain’t Bella
RIGHT?

~ Serendipitous

Fucked the last line

I definitely wanted to write more so I might title this Part 1 instead of Incomplete

Ye the alc

453: It’s Been a While

453: It’s Been a While

Truthfully, I haven’t found the time to sit down and actually write something. If I briefly pass over the twenty-three odd days that have come and gone since the end of exams, it’s difficult to summarise with anything other than indulging in hedonism, and losing myself in dreams that seem too real, that seem to blur that fine line between reality and the realm of imagination. Coupled with having vivid dreams and excruciatingly clear memories, it does start to be a bit difficult to distinguish between the two. Of course when I’m not outside with friends or just outside in general, I’m probably either sleeping or aimlessly wandering on the Internet. Usually lost in my own thoughts, wondering about other people, the nightlife, my future, other worries, succumbing to the pleasures and pains that life offers me, boring things, silly things, strange things. Unfinished thoughts, sentences, lost thoughts, grappling with figments of imagination, broken fragments of slippery dreams lost in translation because of the miscommunication between the conscious and the subconscious. Engaging with my unconventional dreams of looking like a young and employed writer sitting in a coffee shop or a public dining area, not blending in and just being myself. Something that maybe I have done too much, yet too little of. I wish I had engaged more with my memories on paper. My biggest regret is not recording every single moment of my life, or every single thought, but rather that I neglected to take the time out of my day to preserve the threads of the tapestry my eyes weave before me, the forever moving picture that never really stopped or started; it was just there, I guess, but the longer I leave it to decay in the deep recesses of my mind, the more I forget, muddle up, embellish.

Is that not what they say about nostalgia? Going down memory lane, tripped out because everything is the way you remembered it, but coming back to it now, it kind of feels different, like thin, glossy film veiling your vision, or your memories, or both. Actually it’s difficult to know, but the more you trip, maybe the more you notice the bad things, the little, stealthy motions your original eye missed because you were so blinded by love or your constant pursuit of approval that ends up being a fault. Withdrawing from nostalgia trips are difficult because you don’t know, well, sometimes you don’t know how to feel after it. Renewed, displeased, hopeful, ashamed, wistful? Really, it’s difficult to know. For me, though, nostalgia trips aren’t really what they’re meant to be. For me, it’s a mix of the past and the future, peppered with snippets of the present. I prefer to call it being on artificial psychedelics 24/7. It’s easier that way; it’s easier when I don’t have to distinguish between reality and dreams because I am always dreaming, always living in my own world, controlling what I can or cannot do beyond the confines of the education system. If there ever was a time where I did not shit on how god awful the system was to me, to many of my friends, to many other young and younger strangers, that time is now. I have never been more grateful to possess and continue to develop a love for the English language, literary works of art, an acquired taste for thrilling and moving films.

Speaking of which, I went to see Goodbye Christopher Robin this morning. Such a moving film. Anything that focuses heavily on familial relationships, the desire for approval, love, marginalisation (is ostracisation a word??), those really resonate with me. I cried during the film, towards the end. I guess you could say it elicited a strong emotional response from me if we were still in HSC English. That also reminds me, I should probably get a start on my novel. I found it incredibly challenging (or maybe I was just lazy or preoccupied with other things to write those fifty thousand words). I’m not sure. I came here, to where I used to study often and alone, so that maybe I could write something for my novel, but I only ended up writing my next blog post. Whoops.

 

~ Serendipitous

I want to write an alcohol ballad, for my blog. It’s been a while since I rhymed words and wrote a poem, but I guess I’ll give it a go when I get home.

 

452: Hedonism

452: Hedonism

So I have been indulging in this philosophy for a while, ever since the exam block was over. I’ve lost all sense of discipline and enjoy spending more money than I earn. It’s a very interesting experience, to say the least.

I’ve been lost in a haze of cycling pursuing interests, watching films, listening to different kinds of music, meeting curious people, not writing down my memories and cool things that have happened to me. More or less want to start a bullet journal but have other commitments in life as well?!

It’s actually terrible. I want to tell you (and my future self) about all the emotional and physical rollercoasters I’ve been on, being young. That’s the best part. I know I’m young and trying to max out all the things I can do as a young person. Flashing my driver’s licence proudly when I’m asked for ID because I’m buying alcohol with friends, or staying out a bit later than I usually would have for studying, little things. And trying to be a responsible adult, but watching all the numbers go down eventually. Sigh. And formals! How could I forget about formal? Those were fun. It was sort of awkward to see my not-really crush with a date he barely knew but whatever right? Young people do all sorts of stupid things, I guess. Heh.

Anyway I wish I could write more. I probably would, except the prospect of spending most of the night playing Minecraft or watching Star Wars or watching k-drama is too much. I should be doing the stuff on my daily to-do list, but I’m honestly so done lmao

 

~ Serendipitous

Fuck, how could I forget about talking about my novel? Didn’t go so well. I keep making a mental outline of what I want to say, but I keep forgetting, eurgh… oh well. It’ll work out. I’ll get a novel out at some point in my life.