part of what’s scary is how much i want this. i havent felt this anxiety since the months leading up to college admissions decisions back in high school.

part of what’s scary is also the possibility of disappointment. pouring so much of myself into something that rejection takes on a meaning that’s as much internalized as it was externalized, a combination of factors of luck and taste.

part of what’s scary is that i’ve already overcome the fear before action. what’s done is done, now things rest outside of my control. i have to believe in a past me for a future me.

part of what’s scary is that it’s hard to muster up the strength of spirit for resiliency. that maybe i just didn’t love enough to keep going.

but right now i will keep going.

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and heavy hearted

a million things are wearing on my spirits and it sucks to realize i don’t have the energy to do all that i want to do.

i know the universe is on my side

and weren’t we listening to this song at the same time last summer? we just didn’t know it.

a million things i would still do

so many things i want to do

and all of them id give up

just for another moment

it’s okay, i’m growing up. i’ll get used to these feelings. the dulling reverberations of what touched my heart will continue to die down.

you know i know i am capable of so much and won’t let silly things hold me back

at least not when i’m alone like this.

 

It’s strange to see how my life is playing out. These nights of fun and questioning will come to their own ends. How do I grow up and still feel like myself when I have changed so much and never thought enough about where I wanted to be at this point in my life?

It’s a rainy winter in California this year, and I don’t mind except I wish for clearer nights to see the same skies and stars I’ve grown up with. But the motions of the winds, clouds, and celestial objects are out of my control, and there’s some comfort in not having that responsibility.

I’m a bit nervous, to be honest. For January, for the new year, for the going on of a life.

Never quite what I want, always a bit more, a bit less. In the end, I guess it plays out just right.

I’m still nervous though.

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The truths of things are usually more simple than I want to admit.

I’m scared. I miss A. and D. and I don’t know how to give up Z.  I feel guilty. I don’t know what to do. Life is moving too fast for me.

November has been a tough month these past few years.

With B. and all the growing up and out of a life I built up like a Jenga tower. With the college applications four years ago and the naive fun of convincing myself of how I was going to live my life. With the coffee cups and the medical visits and the clouds that covered blue with grey.

I have gotten so much better, happier, but things still get hard. And I don’t know how to describe how my heart hurts now nor probe as to the why. But I get that ball in my throat even though the rest of my body doesn’t want to cry.

The thing is, for one situation at least, that guilt inspires neglect through the neural processing time that it needs, and at the end of it, I just become a shittier person.

In another situation, all the organs, physical and metaphysical, that have built up a knowledge of me by being part of me–heart, mind, and soul–know what I want and what I’m going after. That doesn’t erase the fear. It just makes it worth it.

Still, other options need to be considered. Because life is too precious to be held back by dreams unachieved.

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Here, those that have meant so much to me in the moments cannot touch me. Here, home is where I am and here, heart is no longer reaching out in all directions. Here, now is all that exists.

My emotions have been in a wild disequilibrium the past month. Window scenery from cars and planes alike blur into a nondescript passing of time. Intersections of mind and heart refuse the intimacy of intersections of mouth and hand. The foreseeable futures of never agains drip sadness into present tense.

Heart jolts and I bury my face in my hands as I confess how a simple picture has moved me yet again. Bulbs light and I twiddle my fingers in my lap as the professor talks on. Breath catches and I connect the dots of Cassiopeia as awe startles and settles.

I will lose seasons to love and other seasons to longing. But I have chosen to give compassion and pity and kindness. And life will be hard in other ways I cannot foresee. This past month has brought me back to a mirror reflection of myself in tears asking its own mirror image what I can do. And I have come to the same conclusion that I must make the world a better place and I must start now, with the world around me and with those around me.

I cleaned my room in tears thinking of how I must love you and it drained all of my energy.

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seasons

With the passing of each season, the earth turns over the sun and my life spins with the music of the spheres. The arrangement changes, and so do the scenery, my surroundings, my sentiments, and my sensibility. Different constellations rest above my heres and nows, theres and thens.

It all makes my life feel like an alkaline earth metal, terribly malleable and ductile. I deform under the stress of circumstances, and I feel stretched too thin trying to encompass all the experiences that have been pulled in by the gravity of my reality. The planets may not twinkle from our perspective, but the stars sure do. I falter with those balls of light and chaos.

This year has taken me many different places, from L.A. to Boston to College Station to Seattle to Portland and back to Boston again with some stops in New York and Philadelphia. I’ve always felt that I am partly where I am–sheltered girl from the suburbs of L.A., overwhelmed student in Boston, intern and coffee addict in Seattle–but what I have taken from these places are but a vague notion.

These places have introduced me to many different people. I’ve made connections beyond those on LinkedIn and friendships more real than those on Facebook. Of course, this was how relationships were before the age of digital media, but still, I wonder what I have kept beyond those internet statuses. Life surges onward, and my attention span isn’t large enough to remember everything and everyone as clearly as I’d like to.

These people have shown me many different things. I’ve read new authors, learnt about different nuclear reactors, picked up a calligraphy pen, cancelled plans to see my first baseball game. I’ve gotten a table for one, threw up all of last night’s fun, forgone my usual americano for a glass of tea, fell in love again with the lapping waves and sea breeze. I’ve rediscovered the world back at home, fallen asleep trying to pull all nighters in the library under the dome, given in to disenchantment with talks of eulogies, wrote unsent letters full of unneeded apologies. I’ve been brought to simultaneously happy and sad tears by the stretching out of a hand, and I’ve been so moved by the low sun’s golden touch reflecting on calm waters as my feet sank into wet sand. But when all is said and done, what have these things been but mere moments, time spent, and lost closeness?

Maybe I have come to understand myself a little better, but so much still seems strange. The way life plays out seems different in hindsight, and this makes the present seem as unknown as the future. I come to no conclusions, just another transition.

Summer is winding down. So I will bask in the evening sunshine, finish up this internship as best I can, soak up Seattle’s best coffee, and look forward to going back to school, where one part of life will pick up where it left off. Life may be malleable and ductile, constantly conforming to a tug of war of unbalanced forces (our own included), but it is still beautiful.

I’m sorry my mind and heart were elsewhere tonight. But I’ve been reading Life Is Elsewhere, so maybe Kundera is to blame. The Unbearable Lightness of Being hid in my backpack that night I began to love B. as a person, and he made me hot chocolate and hugged the lightness into something more bearable. I cannot thank him enough for that, and I cannot speak a word of it to him for the vulnerability I feel when it comes to my own struggling grasp on whatever life is. I think D. understood a little bit when he reached his hand out to graze mine over the coffee table and when he squeezed my shoulder that afternoon in his room.

Life is all at once too much and not enough.

I’m sorry I usually do not feel a thing and that when I do feel something, I feel it too much. A. came and went, and I kept my sentiments away from his senses. I wrote a letter I didn’t send because I wanted to write only for myself.

Even though it has been lonely in Seattle, I am so grateful for friends that are willing to care from so many miles away. I am so grateful for all the love I have, and I know the only way for me to deserve it is to spread it. I will love you all back.

Is it strange I was grateful for cloudy skies tonight to obscure the chance of stargazing? I just didn’t want to be by C.’s side when I know I can’t be there fully. His jacket was so soft when we hugged goodbye, and I feel guilty for feeling glad we didn’t kiss. I would have smoked the feel off of my lips.

Why do I let so many people down like this? My life is a daze and these people and places and days are just a passing haze. I’m in a maze and I’m too much of a dreamer to give up and put my right hand on the right wall and trace my way out. I was born left-handed.

We listened in on a lecture for children on the fate and shape of the universe. When they talked about red-shifting and blue-shifting I realized why I find so much comfort in the color blue. It is the color of moving towards something. It is the color of something coming into your life. It is the color of collisions and connections.

My parents and brothers are coming to visit in two days. I love them to death and I’m so excited to feel the stronghold of a love and joint I was born into again.

P. can make music and I can write the lyrics. We can find connection in our differences. Because I looked at his face over my coffee mug and my mind was a blank, my smile without feeling, the moment honest.

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personalities and characters

Honey, you know my heavy heart like this humid air. I’m inspired, I’m unmotivated, I’m lost and found and ultimately okay. I’ll quit, I’ll win, I’ll love. Cigarettes, life, everything.

Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceptive. They say I’m a dreamer, a healer. I have no desire to live if not for others, no matter how independent I am. Gentle, not meek. Indifferent, and wildly sensitive, emotional. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. Prone to sadness, with an acute access to an inner world, disenchanted. Full of love, sensitive to beauty, easily touched.

I can’t focus on this new book because I realize I have done something terribly wrong, and my heart feels broken in this self-inflicted way. I don’t know how much I should explain myself, I don’t know if I should even say anything. Even after all these years, I am still the shy girl. Even after all I’ve grown, I am still the inexperienced human. Even after all the people that have come and gone, I am still the hesitant lover. But to say I love you is too strong because I love too many people, too many things, all too much and not quite enough.

I couldn’t speak today, I couldn’t fall into myself. Suddenly guarded because I don’t fare well with feeling vulnerable. I looked at your face, at the creases of your eyes, and realized you’ve aged. Have I changed too much? Complacency is beginning to replace my excitement, my sense of wonder. Time is winding this journey down to its own endings, and my chest felt increasingly heavy as each minute ticked on by. I left feeling no better than I came. Good and bad, it doesn’t matter. Here and now, there and then, we still exist and my heartstrings still reverberate. Today it dulled to a standstill. I will wait until next time thinking only good things.

C sent me a story I couldn’t bring myself to read. My mind’s a haze, my life’s a daze. No amount of excitement will fulfill me if I don’t find meaning in the experience. No amount of intersections will make me extroverted; I need connection. I read, I relate, I want to cry but I don’t. I want to tell the truth, but the truth isn’t enough of an excuse. I feel at fault. Then I realize things just move too fast for me. When I’m looking out the window from a speeding car on the freeway, when I’m looking out over my balcony with a cigarette between my fingers, it makes no difference. Life moves too fast, people move too fast. I can’t keep up with your conclusions. I need to time to digest and reflect.

Thoughts of A kept me from feeling all this past month. I smoked all the sensations out when I returned home that night, burnt their touch from my lungs, fogged up my mind with a nicotine high. I know it doesn’t help. And I wonder how C would feel if he knew. I’ll stop because E and D care and love me so much. But there is something in shortening the life span, destructive and charming and metaphorical. It’s an act of conviction, it’s an act of regret, it’s an act of love and loss and hope and defeat. Dwell only on the beauty of life. You are my cigarette ash, you are my samskeyti, you are my fleeting moment, you are spoiled light and energy, red-shifting out of existence.

Sorry, bad writing is sometimes a form of accurate writing. This is not the case, so it is no excuse. It is just my subsistence.

I don’t want to say you inspire in me poetry, but how else do I put it? Life falls into place and then it turns into a mess and these feelings coincide with when you come and when you go.

The stars are out tonight, no doubt, but I am in my room, in my bed, unable to sleep. I think about the last three weeks. I’ve been in Seattle three weeks now, and throughout that small frame of time, so many people have come and gone. I realize that despite the fun and good times, I am an introvert at heart and these interactions leave me feeling empty when I have failed to make meaningful connections. I have never been so inspired in my life, and I have never been so unmotivated. What a strange juxtaposition. I want to tell you everything, and yet you are not here to listen. I write in my journal instead.

I stapled an ink-stained paper napkin into my journal the afternoon after. It contained a summary of scenes and sentiments in incomplete sentences. It’s all I have kept two weeks later.

I tell myself it’s okay to think of people more than they think of you and it’s okay to think of people less than they think of you, but somehow it all feels unfair still. I feel vulnerable and I feel guilty and I tell all my best friends that I love them to death because I only want to live if I can bring a little more happiness into their worlds.

There was a moment earlier when something in my brain chemistry must have glitched and I lost a sense of connection to reality. Maybe I had just fallen asleep for a microsecond, but that feeling threw me off balance and I feel I have lost some abstract grasp of what this world is. So now I am awake again and I am just a little disturbed.

I don’t feel unhappy, far from that. I’m weening off of the fluoxetine, and I’m learning to be a little more okay each day. And I’m learning to accept that some days are bad days and some days are good days and what’s important is the balance of the weeks and months and years. Focus once in a while but come back to the bigger pictures and never lose sight of life’s beauty because that’s what makes it worth it.

You’ll be back in ten days. I wonder what will change.

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Maybe this isn’t writer’s block. I’m just having trouble being human. I’ve been reading too much Murakami, sleeping too little, smoking too many cigarettes, feeling too like or unlike myself, I don’t even know anymore. DY has finally left my mind, AS has taken over. I forget how to write like I forget how to live and how to eat because food doesn’t taste good with the nicotine building up in the back of my throat. You know what’s wrong, but you don’t know who you are.

Listening to the same songs too many times, not relating anymore. You get out of your body by looking in the mirror too long. This is the same thing.

I’ll eat only because I know I should and because I’ve been throwing up without meaning to.

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