sometimes when you love someone, you desperately long to grow at the same pace as they are, just so no one outgrows the other, and that everything will remain the same even as you’re both moved endlessly through the machinery of life. in the wake of frightening events i sometimes panic and fret that i am not keeping the right pace, that i am losing the real plot in my pursuit of transient things. but then i say a quick prayer and i am, incredibly, back in the warmth of these bubbles that i adore, so perfectly filled with the words and the fragrant hair of my soulmates, with whom i can unabashedly and excitedly be myself. in here there is no room for hesitation, apologies or second thoughts — it is a space that bursts at the seams with a kind of love that is tough and yet so humorous, tinged at the edges with inside jokes and immortal admiration for each other, giving me these silly smiles as i float away.

tonight i am thankful for buddies: old time, late time, and long time. and in just a whisper i will admit that i am thankful even for the sometimes.

but if i tell the world i’ll never say enough, cos it was not said to you…

specks of the past do sometimes flit my way, and lodge themselves in my eye. flailing then i can no longer see the world before me, but am forced to look within as i forcefully blink. in these instances i realize how much i’d like to forget you the way you forgot me, but i don’t quite have the heart to, and so i walk around in circles trying hard to extract as many painful but useful lessons from our acquaintance as i can, to justify to myself that there is some good that will come from still keeping you in my mind. it’s a tiresome process and many times i feel like an imbecile in denial, with these useless scraps of information in my hands that i can’t really do much with. i’ve become so ruined and i’m not sure whose fault it is, if it’s mine or yours and if i could ever one day forgive myself for having met you. why’d you find me here?

i just got home from a nice night out with two former colleagues at everyone’s favourite blog advertising network, and last night i had dinner with kim and gareth where kim cooked up a delicious storm of roast chicken, layered potatoes and meringue cookies. it’s always nice to reconnect with the blogosphere even if in this rather remote and infrequent manner, because i miss so many people in there and it reminds me to be thankful of all the big and small treasures blogging has given me. it has made me many good friends, given me several precious best friends and most definitely thrown in my face many lessons that would have taken me years to learn otherwise. for these things and more, i will always be grateful for being bored one night and starting that little personal space on geocities.com 10 years ago.

so … i’m a year away from graduating and leaving the big apple. three years ago i quite disliked new york city; i found it abrasive and individualistic, and ironically in such a place it was hard to be ‘myself’. but i am beginning to love the city, for its boundless opportunities and its grace in allowing a tired and grey you to be a brightly shining phoenix — constantly in a state of flux, rebirth and renewal of the self — and for these reasons it’s been great to pursue an education there. for better or for worse, that part of me that searches for a chemical reaction on first contact has disappeared. i’m in the younger stages of realizing that the “i just know” sentiment doesn’t apply to everything, including cities, and that one has to be open to the element of surprise and yet know that the reason you love that city is because some things in it don’t change, and will remain a comfort to your changing, growing self. like how the entrances to central park are always just there even though i can never remember which streets they are on. or how the layout of manhattan is pretty straightforward, but once you get deep downtown, even a good sense of direction isn’t going to be of much help in finding one’s way (if one is searching for something in particular).

i think i mentioned somewhere in some recent post that i’ve lost a lot lately. like with most kinds of loss, i’ve been trying hard to repress a lot of the memories, and with time i begin to succeed until someday i realize that it’s been a full ten hours since i last thought about my loss. and then a full twelve hours. then a full waking day. and at some point, you look upon some thing and a distant memory flutters in a cobwebbed corner of your mind. i was looking at some pictures the other day and a whole host of these distant memories fluttered like an army of sparrows. ah, perhaps i should stop taking pictures of things i am bound to lose :) but what kind of life would that be.

and so, for my own archiving, here are some fragments of things i once cherished:

aiya i really didn’t want to be emo today, y’know, but the sensations are just here and i haven’t been able to shake them off. no matter what i do, i feel preoccupied – like i want to do something about what i’m feeling but i have absolutely nothing that is useful. no hands, no mind, no willpower, and all i can feel is this really dull pain. yes i’m aware i’m sounding like an angsty teenager, talking about ‘pain’ and all, but there’s really no other word for it. it’s like the underside of my skin has receptors, and they’re all in mutiny, standing up straight and boiling over so that i will wake up and do something. it feels like a textbook panic attack, in which i was once told that for several, very acute seconds you feel like dying.

i haven’t felt like i could write coherently and truthfully on this blog for a long time, and for just as long i haven’t felt like i could talk to the people closest to me about the things i truly think about and feel. i think all the trust debacles over the past few years have cumulatively been more than i could handle, and now there’s something within me that’s dysfunctional and broken as a result. sometimes i meet people who fix those issues and heal me just by sitting close to me, and saying some small inconsequential things, but these people are few and far in between and they often don’t know the effect they have on me. maybe if they did they wouldn’t be so cruel (to me), or they wouldn’t leave (me).

sadly i have come to think of myself as this person with life support, that i’m connected by some invisible tether to a space outside of me in which nothing but pure truth exists. it’s a small space, but it’s there, just for me and the person to whom i tell everything unadulterated and unabashed. i don’t know why it has to be a person but nothing else seems to compare. writing on paper, talking to god, talking to myself — none of these things work, because i need some kind of heat, a blink, a murmur that tells me there is a living, breathing being who could be doing other things with his or her time, is listening to me right now, and caring. caring: such a big and powerful force for this little world that we inhabit. it warms me and makes me want to create and expel honesty, pouring it all into that space of pure truth, so i can see it all and admire how simple and beautiful things can be when i remove myself from the muddle. but there are times when this security dissipates, and everything ceases to make sense to me. i can’t think. i can’t breathe. and then i feel like i feel tonight, full of hopelessness and very frightened.

how silly… understanding one’s existence only through something outside of oneself. but that’s just how i was built, incredibly weak like that.

small grains of hope sometimes explode within my chest in the most mundane of moments, like at six in the morning when i am dressed in sweatpants and still tiredly wading through dunes of reading assignments. he sleeps beside me as i read, and now and then there are spliced seconds when his foot brushes mine, and suddenly i feel – yes, this is it. this is the bubble that i need. this is the space that i want to be in, free from the oppressive heat of hostile manners, from bad news, social media, and impaired judgment (my own). occasionally he wakes up, violently ripped from the fringes of his strange dreams and begins to talk about ethereal things, and i cant help but wonder if he is made out of thin air, if at this time a little more than a year ago i embarked on this miraculous fantasy and created for myself a good thing that doesn’t actually exist. but then slowly his mystical speech begins to become more real, and familiar, and actually tangible — and i am faced with the sad truth that i am the anti midas. this is what i do, and it is unfortunately cyclical and permanent. then the small grains dissipate, and i go to sleep too.