on growing up

• nobody knows what they’re doing
• nobody knows who they are
• people are always still people. and the rules are made by people.
• and those rules are flawed.
• people love and people hurt and people die
• and the ones left behind are left to cry
• even if they’re old, like 60;
• because losing a mom is losing a mom no matter how old you are.
  
  
• nobody knows what they’re doing.
• we’re all just trying to figure out the thing called life
• which didn’t come with a manual
• and no one can tell you how yours should go
• no matter how much they want to —
• or how much you might want them to.
• we mess up regardless of the advice others give,
• and that’s just a part of life.
• everyone is just like you,
• yet everyone is nothing like you.
  
  
• nobody knows what they’re doing.
• everybody is just trying.

a brief memoir of strangers

the first person that comes to mind is the girl at the pool in Thailand. dark skin, dark braided hair, a pink little bikini on a girl who must not have been older than seven. her throat had a scar on it, and her voice was nothing more than a rasp. i never asked what happened.

on an airplane, a couple years later. a red-headed girl with a pixie cut and a choker. she noticed me staring at her; i wonder what she thought i saw. all my mind could think was, you look cool and i wish i could be your friend.

washington state, 2013: a boy at a summer camp with dark hair and green eyes. if he had been wearing an orange shirt, he could have convinced me he had killed a minotaur before. i saw him in glimpses over the next week.

three years later in south africa, it was a big white man on the beach. we were asking him what his backstory was. when he mentioned drugs, prison, and Jesus, i thought the world couldn’t be half bad.

tokyo, 2017, in the underground walkway between two subway lines. a woman sobbed uncontrollably as she walked, and everyone averted their eyes. i think we all wanted to say, ‘it’s going to be okay soon.’ no one did.

2018. florida. a janitor thanked me for doing a small thing like saving him some candy when the rest of our coworkers had finished the rest. he gave me a talk about how much little actions could mean. he ended with, ‘God bless you.’

last year, on the way from school. a man ran off the bus, and when i looked ahead to see what he was running toward, his daughter was waving her arms and running back toward him with a giant smile on his face. and in that moment i realised i’m also a side character.

rain slips through my fingertips

and so do you,

just like the tadpole i lost

back to the pond as a nine year old.

you’re slippery,

or maybe my hands are –

i could never really tell.

when we were kids,

no one told us how much love would cost;

it was something no one seemed to acknowledge

because, i suppose, you rarely identify the water you swim in.

now the waves have come to sweep away

any semblance of the life we shared

and i am left once again

alone in the rain.

terraforming your mind

remember your mind can make beautiful things too,

not just angst.

maybe it’s what you’re feeling now,

but what if you slowly chip away what’s already there

to slowly form

something

a little

brighter

?

intrusive thoughts

i’m going to super glue my fingers together to see how much strength it takes to pull them back apart.

i’m going to scream into the void to see if anyone will scream back at me, or just realise it was me screaming at myself from the start.

oof. angst. that’s why you should use glue. stick those pieces of a mind back together, ssshhhtk! and then hold them in place for hours. when you let go, they can hold themselves together, but just barely. hold them carefully.

(or drop them!)

nobody is listening. what does it mean to listen? asking questions, right? if you want someone to listen but they aren’t allowed to ask questions, do you even want them to listen? or is it only that you want someone to understand.

i don’t think that’s it, but you can’t think of something better at this point, can you?

shhhh they’re not supposed to know.

they told me there was nothing past death, and that i should go back.

which is ridiculous now that i think about it. i had just taken the effort to die, and now they were telling me ‘nothing exists beyond the void of the life you knew’; yet their very existence defied their own claims. who knows who or what they were, but they clearly didnt want me there, and so they sent me back. what kind of place we were in, i don’t remember – maybe a room, maybe an empty plain – but somewhere filled with a white fog beyond which you could see nothing.

no, maybe that was it. maybe it was all nothing except for them.

rather than expose their disinformation by pointing out the fact of their presence, i only felt a dull disappointment at the time. they faded from view as time rewound (even though time wasn’t supposed to exist there. curious). as the memories return of that place, surely one of them was God? and He had said that He did not want me.

i found myself back on earth. a younger version of myself might have found the void beyond death a great reason to die, but now with firm confirmation of the absence of any kind of afterlife, the existence of life became much more beautiful and endearing. it would be the only thing i would experience, and that made it all the more precious.

dream logic is something that will ever elude us.

shhhhhhh

listen. do you hear that?

just now.

i farted.

the danger of love

is that it’s the most vulnerable yet comforting state of existence.

To love means investing time and energy into someone who may or may not reciprocate. It means taking a step forward even when you’re not sure how someone will react. It means getting hurt because you care, and it means being willing to overlook the imperfections of another human who will inevitably let you down.

To be loved means being known, and being known means being vulnerable. It involves tangling up with other people — letting them in on the mess inside that might cause them to draw away and confirm your suspicion that you’re unworthy of love.

To love is to risk.

And yet… we need it so desperately.

It’s funky to need something so badly and yet be so deathly afraid of it as well. To be loved is to risk. To love is to risk.

the angst from the conversation we just tried to have.

static begins to play in the silence in which you expect an answer. an answer won’t be given; i’ve forgotten the question at this point, and the thoughts have been fleeing from my head. maybe they’re trying to protect me by keeping it blank. is it blank? no, there’s a song playing in the background, and the voices have been changing out in fragments like there are five people inside talking at once. what are they talking about, i wonder. the blood pounds in my head. what started as a bit of tiredness has evolved into the beginnings of what i know to be a battering headache. i put a cold hand to my warm forehead.

corona, says one thought ironically.

i think i was happy yesterday. i think i was even happy today, but then it’s not my happiness anymore. it’s a stranger’s, and warm liquids are threatening to spill out. my eyes. my nose. my head just banged against the table. what do i even feel right now.

uh. nothing anymore. the tissues are warm on my desk and there’s a stain on my jeans.

shit.

f- f- f- f- f- a word repeats in my head until i don’t remember what it means. i think my fingers aren’t working anymore. the feelings are gone and instead of a sniveling pity party inside, there’s just a cold corridor filled with spiderwebs. is this body mine? i don’t think so. there are even soundwaves beating against my eardrums that should maybe make something happen inside. it used to sometimes. the tears are long gone now though, and my throat didn’t even get to scream.

huh. hello?

i never liked you.

4:39am thoughts

halla, it is currently — yes, as you guessed it — four in the morning, yet here I am for some inexplicable reason.

the inexplicable reason is my arms are hurting. Not sure why. The only inexplicable part is why they’re hurting.

In any case, it’s time to start an early-morning rambling before I inevitably go back to sleep and wake up regretting this several hours later. Who knew arm pain could keep you up? I did before actually but I forgot. Fun reminders.

Anyway, what is up. I was sorting out some crap in my room yesterday, and I came across a couple old letters that an adult friend ‘sent’ nine-year-old me to humour me at a time when I put up little cardboard mailboxes on every family member’s door in the house. What a champ. Those letters are epic and I will keep them. Anyway, I didn’t want to keep them in the little box they were in anymore, so I decided to stick them in one of my old journals — my first journal, actually, which I’d originally started for some kind of project my mom made us do, then just continued afterward.

The ramblings of a 9-year-old are hilarious; I journaled quite literally and just explained everything that happened in a day. My mom was the one who made us kids start it for some reason, so she read through them like they were some kind of homework assignment (which in a way they kind of were). At one point I started an entry with, ‘My mom said I don’t have to write every detail.’

I guess my mom didn’t want to read what I ate for breakfast every morning, or about how I ate said breakfast with my sister under the dining table because it was fun.

A few years ago I wrote a mandatory post on why I personally find journaling fun, but one thing I’m pretty sure I left out was the bit where you get to read your old journals to see how you’ve grown or changed over the years. Of course, most of the information in my very first journal isn’t exactly insightful or deep, but it does give a glimpse into the mind of a kid and how they process things. Reading through some of my journal entries from a couple years ago reveals things like just how dark of a place I was in without realising it. Some entries from when I was a sixteen-year-old were surprisingly mature and thoughtful. (Imagine having depth of thought nowadays.) In a way, reading past journals is like meeting your past self to see what you think of them now. Is it always fun? No. My journals are full of random crap and details that are no longer important to me now, but sometimes you can find interesting tidbits amongst the past brain throw-up.

Huh. I knew this post would end up focusing on one thing. Good thing it usually does.

Well, that’s my 4am self’s thoughts on journaling in light of reading some old journal entries. My arms still hurt, but maybe exhaustion will trump the pain.