walking contradictions.

 i've been tasked to write two blogposts on love for the magazine i write for. 

it is, by no means, an official stint- i know the head of my team quite well, enough to have gone out for cocktails on multiple evenings. despite that, it has enough weight to have a spot on my cv and i tend to take assignments i need to write for quite seriously regardless of how frivolous the actual request is. normally, a trait i feel proud of myself for but it's been a month since the editor in chief reached out to me and i haven't been able to give her a single sentence.

love was something i couldn't really shut up about. a short peruse through this blog will lend enough credence to that. but i find it increasingly hard to muster any worthy sentiments about it now, or at least worthy enough to write about and feel good about other people reading it. i do have thoughts about it but any of that is reserved for crumpled up papers i stuff in my pillowcase or in impulsive conversations with my friends, not in a magazine. 

recently having been disillusioned with love in any romantic sense (and that is what i usually refer to when i think of love), i knew the moment the task was given to me that i'd have to be very careful about denouncing romance and the great ideal of it while writing the pieces itself- none of the people in the editing team, nor the readership, necessarily needs to see any of that cynicism. especially when the next issue comes out for valentines. 

i don't want to be careful about it though. there's something to be said about how everything i write always betrays how i actually feel about certain things- i will shake someone's hand quite happily but i cannot spare any words of kindness for them. it's not something i feel all that terrible about anymore, if abstract, unbearably shitty writing is where i can imbue any honesty, i shall do it. but i cannot do it right now, not where it matters. 

the prompt for one of the pieces was left completely open, the only requirement was that it needed to center around love somehow. writing about friendship is too passé, writing about family is too touchy, writing about loving yourself is something i have zero interest in doing, and i cannot possibly write about romance without getting a little sharp.  

or a little sad. 

i think the idea i had of love was so incredibly one-dimensional that it very much felt like a noose around my neck and the only person who could cut the rope was this non-existent construction of love incarnate- someone with a sharp enough knife to cut through rough twines of rope in a second. unfortunately, i think whoever possesses a knife that sharp also has the tools to tighten the rope itself and knock the chair underneath my feet away. you don't get to choose which act they do. you're choking on your own spit, clawing away at the slipknot regardless. just pray you're lucky enough to find someone who will cut the rope for you, or at least try their best to. 

love really isn't like that though. condensing love- or to be fair, specifically romance- into a horrific metaphor is something i can imagine a sad little teen on the internet would do (and if it isn't already too on-the-nose, this was me even just a year or two ago on this blog). it's not something i like doing so much anymore. and even if i do do it, considering i overuse metaphors like commas, drawing a parallel between something that's supposed to be the sweetest emotion in the world to hanging yourself isn't tasteful. it is true you cannot untie the rope yourself, but you're not born into the world with a rope around your neck either. 

love will not save you just as much as it cannot doom you. 

i wonder, though. 

i haven't used the word love this much in so long. i've become uncomfortable seeing it or hearing it. the shape of it feels wrong in my mouth so i stuff it down and choke. and that's completely okay. i do need to get used to thinking about it again if i want to produce something i'm even remotely satisfied with for the magazine. which is not to say i haven't been thinking about it at all, it's just strictly been around what words i can slap down on the document i have. anything i've thought of feels disingenuous and blasé, and for all the negative words i imagine people might assign to my writing- cringe, overdramatic, pretentious- i can't let it be disingenuous.  

let me try to be kinder about it.

two of my close friends went through major breakups recently. we went out to a bar nearly every night of the first week after simply so they had company, and while life felt so syrupy and honeyed when i realized i'm someone these two people can lean on, i remembered a time earlier this year where i was in arguably a very similar position but i just hoped my bedframe could take my entire weight instead, no shoulders to be found. cold water down my neck. i've wiped it all away now, but i can feel the chilled ghost rush of it at times. it's a time that feels so dreamlike to me now, any memory i have of the first seven months of this year is swirled by this persistent haze that i can't brush away, but i think it's for the better. very recently, i cut and colored my hair differently to then and i look back at pictures of white-haired me and i feel a small jolt. the restless cottony feel of recognizing the dead-eyed look in every photo, of realizing love was the end-all and be-all to this person in the photo and that's the sole thing i'm having trouble with now. 

but i still love every other construction of love. contrary to how skeptical i am about romance now, i always have. i love looking at the crow's feet around my mom's eyes and knowing it's because she's been smiling at my dad everyday for 42 years. i love the asthma pump in my mom's bag so she can hand it to my dad whenever he needs it. i love how my mom relaxes into her pillow when i kiss her goodnight, all her pain-wracked shivering easing just a little bit. it's a momentary relief and it hurts me deeply that i cannot permanently take any of that away, but as someone who spent the last two years begging for a moment's relief, i cannot downplay the importance of that small second of painlessness i can afford her. 

i love the way my friends' eyes widen when we catch each other on our way to different classes. the impromptu hugs, so often that i don't freeze when i feel their arms around me anymore. still, they ask if i was okay with that. i reassure them each time. i love the string of texts announcing when everyone is free so we can go check out that brunch place on the water. i love looking down the hallway in the apartment i share with my friend to see the contrasting led striplight colors in our own rooms. i love the slow, steady realization that stopping myself from getting too attached to my friends does not protect me as much as i thought it did. there are scarier things to get attached to. 

there's always a certain emotion i have in my head before i start writing something, no matter how small it is. from a text to a full-length story, i like it when every sentence is infused with a little bit of that emotion i had in mind (it was confusion for this entry. quiet, controlled frazzle). the issue is i don't know what emotion i want to put forward for the magazine, and i cannot get started until i've decided. there's just so much to untangle before i can reasonably write something centered about love that's meant for other people to read. i keep coming back to love (romance) being an all-encompassing savior, something that plasters all the cracks in the walls, but love doesn't do that. it never will. all the sweetness i can muster up with which i can write a piece on love won't be enough to hide how far i want to run away from it now. 

but i know, despite all my waffling, they are going to be hopeful pieces. i don't know yet where i'll fish the hope from but if my notions on love itself can't bring forward any singular, titular emotions, i know my feelings on hope will. 

two sides of the same coin? perhaps. i just need to find a way to balance right on the edge between heads and tails. 

creature comforts.

out of all the ugly feelings i've come to accept are unavoidable, nostalgia isn't one of them. i'm 7000 kilometers away but i miss the dark red wall that used to be behind my head. pale bookshelves that have since been sold to a friend. dark wood vinyl peeling up in some places after 18 years. it's approaching close to two years since i last saw it but i miss a red and gray low couch. i miss the muffled sound of desert thunder in the afternoon and i miss a gray cat. pink and green bedsheets and a springy mattress. 

i miss my home, in every sense of the word. people, places, things i can never go back to. places that haven't felt my absence but i would give up years off my life to go back one more time. 

a friend from university told me she wants to explore a lot of things around the city and i said sure, anytime, we have a year and a half left to see them all. and i hadn't realized exactly what i said right then but she told me that was so sad to hear and it delved into a conversation about the future. what happens after i move again. after the carpet got taken from underneath my feet earlier this year, i suddenly realized i don't know anymore what i want or if anything i could ever want is achievable at all. but i'm still steadily marching into the future. i'm worried there's an end to the chain the past has tied around my ankles and i won't be able to move any more further once i reach a certain point. i pull at the chain now and i can feel there's some give to it but i can't tell for how much more. i don't have boltcutters.

i'm not necessarily worried about growing older but i am scared that the weight of only remembering the things i treasure and not having the real thing anymore will root me down to where i am. i might have to move sooner than i thought i would and i won't return to the first apartment i've ever lived in after moving away from my parents. it's not a necessarily breathtaking place but it's the first. of course, there are always new things to treasure. maybe one day the stripey cup from ikea that i've been using for over a decade now will break and i will mourn it but i'll get a new cup i like just as much. but i'll keep a piece with me always, wishing i had the entire thing once again. i had a certain desk for years and years back home and i bought it again last year for my new place; spent 7 hours assembling it alone and told no one how i had closed my eyes every once in a while pretending i'm in 4th grade again assembling it for the first time, so deeply excited to have a real desk. i imagine i'll be 25 and then 30 buying the same model, as long as it isn't discontinued. 

my point is, i keep the glass shards and i reassemble the same things even when i have the opportunity for something new. and i've been told to learn how to let go terribly harshly once and then kindly once, and it hurt just as much both times. but it was warranted advice. i don't know if i know how to move on properly. perhaps if the desk is badly made. perhaps if the cup has sharp edges that cut into my lips. but i'd take that too, maybe. sand down the sharp edges myself and buy better bolts. anything if it meant i could hold on a little longer. even to things that don't want me anymore. 

update is an ugly word pt.5

as it turns out, after the six-odd years of having this blog, that little prick of embarrassment never actually goes away when you open a blank page knowing you're about to write about yourself, to yourself, for yourself. i think i'm in a wildly different place than i have ever imagined myself being in, but i'm still who i was at 14. at least, in this sense.

regardless, i'm 20 now and today was my third day of the second year of uni. the work has already piled up and i've been making my steady, slow way through the pile of articles i need to read and papers i need to write all day. i remembered this blog existed while drafting an application to a magazine, and then proceeded to spend an hour reading it while i should have been tweaking my CV instead. to think i'm talking about my CV on here when a while ago, i would talk about monthly school tests. i don't miss it that much, but i do miss feeling like i was at home somewhere. knowing where everything is in the pantry, knowing i could feel my way through it in the dark. 

i've been doing well though. for a while, i really wasn't. i really, really wasn't and i was almost convinced i had done something absolutely horrendous in my past life (or maybe even this one) and the universe was taking from me what it's owed over two very long, very hard years, but a thing or two happened. and then maybe a third one, and i'm trying harder now. not to say i wasn't before - i don't think i will ever again tap into the sheer amount of fortitude i was displaying getting out of bed everyday all these months- but i wasn't seeing any results for it. in fact, things got actively worse the harder i tried (and i've recently been awoken to how bitter i really am about it by the people i've talked to. and navigating that bitterness is another story completely). but i am seeing the results now. i hope. i spent a lot of time sad, and then a lot of time unimaginably angry, and now i've mellowed out into someone who wakes up at 6am and makes spinach and mushroom omelettes before class. i don't spend half an hour trying to hold back an intense cry- most times, giving into it- each morning while doing my makeup. the removal of that impulse has added quite a lot of time to my routine actually. enough to comfortably make spinach and mushroom omelettes and still catch the tram on time to reach class 20 minutes early. 

i posted a couple years ago about waiting for the other foot to drop and imagining the sheer relief i would feel once it did in spite of however bad the consequences may be, and i believe it finally did drop this year. things got as bad as i could humanly handle without cracking permanently and now i'm scrabbling my way back up, grateful i have enough resources in me to still believe in an 'up'. the relief was a little hard to find, i imagine i'm still trying to find it wholly but it's there and i find fragments of it on cold days. i go out for brunch with a friend and spend my evening swimming sometimes. not every day is like that though, probably the very precious minority of them. but they're there. and i don't have the constant threat of a foot waiting to crush me into the ground looming over my head anymore. nothing is blocking the clouds. i can enjoy a cup of matcha without having to stuff down an ache every conscious second. 

i'm closer to figuring out what i may actually want out of life. or to be more accurate, i'm closer to figuring out what i don't want. i have always had this very specific idea for myself, this ideal i would hold myself to while planning anything that honestly had nothing to do with money or any material possession. and i thought it was achievable. for a long while, i wholeheartedly believed someday, i'm going to bring this ideal to life. it's gonna happen. how could it not? i've given everything to it. it has to happen. but i've realized it might not, and now i'm not even sure i'd really like it to happen. maybe it's the cynicism talking, and i will soon go back to wanting what i have wanted my entire life instead of some vague, unspecified goal but things feel extremely different now. in a way it never has before. not sure if i like it or not. 

but i still am the person i was when i was 14, for better or for worse. except im in a different continent with different hair and a different name. i draw a little bit better and i know how to cook now. my friends like the brownies i make. i like my friends. i like spinach and mushroom omelettes. i hated the last two years but i like that i can acknowledge that everything that happened needed to happen without wanting to break every bone in my body. i like that i let myself feel angry now. feel bitter. feel resentful. admit that certain things are absolutely the wrong thing to do and to be done unto you. i like that i do not wake up with a racing heart every morning and check my phone (and then try to hold back tears for half an hour). 

maybe not quite the same person anymore then