6 Months, Perhaps More

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I guess life has been so busy that I forgot about wordpress. It’s been a little over 6 months since I last came here, and I have no idea what to write other than a little filler on how my life has been for the past 6 months (and how it is now).

1. I went to Japan over the summer for a homestay/summer abroad program. It was fantastic and fun.
2. Senior year sucks. Honestly.
3. Personal essays/supplements are so hard to write.
4. I made honor roll for the first time last spring.
5. It’s already sweater weather where I am now, and the fluctuating temperatures are making my throat feel funny.
6. I got a tumblr, and I really like it.

500 Days of Autumn

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I just watched the movie 500 Days of Summer, and it completely blew me away. Even though, at the surface, it’s just some chick-flick, it really is something more. The screenplay writers really wrote beautifully and the delivery and pace were right on mark. I ended up crying at multiple scenes just because the screenplay was just so incredible.

Rain Song

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It was going to rain, and there was nothing I could do about it. To be sure, I opened the window and stuck my head out and breathed in. The air was humid and dank, the sky dark gray, bugs swooping near the earth. It was going to rain.

It no longer became a matter of whether it was going to rain, but when it would start pouring. I rushed to grab my things before taking off into the too-warm air.

There were barely any people out—they all felt the mugginess and oppression I felt. There seemed to be no escape from the oncoming storm or the feeling that stuck like a second skin, a snake waiting to shed and renew.

It was with these thoughts that I made my way across the school’s paths and towards home. With my sheet music in hand, I rushed across the cement paths, eager to reach my destination. Somewhere inside of me, I believed that at the destination, there would be no more humidity. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The rain started only moments after I fiddled with finding my keys in my pockets. I made it inside with only a few drops on me, but more importantly and more unfortunately, a few drops of water marring the music.

There was something to be said about the damaged messenger of music, the sheets that had a few ruined notes, and in turn, a ruined song. After all, I was a romantic, and romantic did as romantic believed in order to try and be a little less lonely.

Secure

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The dusty photographs drift past her outstretched fingertips, like feathers blown by the storm she is. Drifting, drifting, almost weightless—the word is almost—she feels her throat lock in an attempt to calm down. Memories are nothing to be scared of. Remembering is what scared her.

 

She has to—she has a moral duty to go back and peek at the feather photographs, dripping past her fingers as evasive as water has always been. But here—here in her own mind—everything is possible. She can conjure water out of thin air and change the memories in the photographs with a snap of her frail fingers.

 

Pulling her face from her frail fingers, she peeks at the memory closest to her. It is them, together. Her and her—friends, sisters, souls. Her and him—lovers, haters, enemies. But are they really? She snorts contemptuously at the photo before kicking it far, faraway.

 

She flicks her fingers out, and the photograph memories fly into one small, contained tornado out the infinitely faraway door. No matter how much she wants to walk outside and relax in the sunshine, the door is too far. She has tried to reach infinity—oh yes, she’s tried—and failed.

 

The only source of light comes from the window, a dusty sunlight filtering through the old room. It sits upon the old floorboards, turning the splintery stuff into honey and evoking the smell of old books.

 

The bookshelves—oh! the bookshelves—are in two rows, tall enough for her to reach. And they stretch out towards infinity, not quite touching the door, but far enough that she can spend her own infinity reading the numerous books and never reach the end.

 

And this is how she is—reduced to memories in this long hall with no one else to amuse her but imagination. We are all history in the end—we are become ink in books and old parchment and raw earth.

 

She, too, knows she will become ink very soon and another—a boy, perhaps—shall take her place and become ink himself. Together, they shall revel in the stories as the last of their kind until they realize there is too little ink to account for all their trials and woes, and they will become one sentence on a page at the end of infinity. To this fate, she is secure.

– – –

This is what I envision my mind palace to be like: lonely but secure.

Recollection

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           Have you ever grown out of something? Like, how something used to be very dear to your heart. Maybe it was an old toy or a television show or book or a person. You’d find yourself being drawn back time and time again.

And then you would tell yourself to quit—to quit for real, because you never seemed able to. And when you quit, when you finally managed to stay away for an extended period of time, you just want one more look back at your childhood. You want just one recollection of the time where you spent immaturity and started to grow up. And you just want—you just want one night to reminisce and feel nostalgic for a happier self.

So, one day when you have little to no obligations, you decide to do it. That is, you recollect what you’d previously sworn off. So you look through old things: photographs or writings or dusty stuffed animals. And you know that your memories of looking at these will fade the way the photographs and your memories of the photographed faded. And you’ll start feeling something—perhaps sadness or loss—because you can never relive those memories once they’re lost.

You’ll look at your large hand, clutching the photograph, now cracked and wrinkled and twice as large as the hand that previously held the item. And you’ll realize, though you’re still the same person, you’ve changed. And that you’ve finally grown up through something. And that will mark the start of the period called “growing up.”

The other children will want to know how you do it, this so-called “growing up.” But don’t tell them. Let them retain their innocent selves a little longer—as long as they can. Because childhood is like memories.

– – – – – –

Just a small something I wrote this morning.

Mood: Nostalgic

Song: Like We Used To by A Rocket to the Moon

Everywhere

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Not sure what it is, but I thought I would show you anyways. It’s darker than almost all of what I write.

– – – – – – – – – –

Everywhere I go, I see you.

It’s never you fully, but it’s the small things—the details that I didn’t notice before.

I notice them now.

In the glass dew drops that cling to plants, I see not dew, not glass, not nature, not anything beautiful. I see you in the brown paper bag that the old woman that lives across the road clutches on her Saturday morning grocery trip, and I see you in the way the young alcoholic two houses down watches everyone from his dusty window. I see your long fingers in the pencils all school girls seem to be wearing behind their ears. I see your ears wearing the bright blue earmuffs that I could never bring myself to return.

The way your eyes shined: the old streetlight on the edge of my street, flickering at 10 PM. The way your lips would curl into a ghost of a smile: the way the Starbucks barista pronounces how in the how are you. The way you clutched your notebook: the graffiti scribbles on the forlorn, overworked train that passes by your house.

There are bigger things, too. The way you watched everyone—the way an artist tries to understand  the world. The way you ate—bite by bite, a minnow tackling a whale shark. The way you walked out of any doors—always looking up because not enough people appreciated door frames.

I see your left, barely arched eyebrow in every stroke of a line. The sign no longer holds words, but your left eyebrow in multitude, in different angles, in different poses. Together, they are not readable but emotional.

The way your hair curled on rainy days. The way your off-white teeth beamed a small smile when you wanted to laugh at an inappropriate time. The way the edge of your eyelids crinkled into mini-smiles when I tripped.

I see your tears in the broken faucet in the kitchen. The way you clenched your fists: broken light bulb in the hallway. The way you left—no longer looking at the doorframe. I see your letter, try and reread it, but only see your eyebrow. The way you left one heel on the doorstep of my house but never came back to get it.

I see you in small things and big things and nooks and crannies and dreams. I see you in the way I can’t clean up the vase in the entryway because I broke it right after you left.  I see you in the way empty painkiller bottles line the kitchen counter and how none of them ease the throbbing.

Everywhere I go, I see you.

 

 

Terrible

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And it’s school again. Yesterday, I was almost overwhelmingly stressed before I realized it had been about 24 hours since school started again.

I just found a beautiful quote on a facebook friend’s wall. It is almost inconsequential to say, but the facebook friend who is—in reality—not much of a friend but more of an acquaintance.

“You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terrible false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”