get wired to strike through me

the new is the beautiful

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:03:28 GMT

Everything stings my eyes. The cold, adjusting to brightness, the presence of others. I am trying to remember that which makes me sad also makes me alive. And if I move on too quickly, if I bury it by not giving it due weight, I'll erase the rawest, truest parts of me.

anything, everything

Fri, 22 May 2009 14:13:44 GMT

I’d listen to tapes at night of bits of speech pasted together to form the sentences he’ll never say, I’ll cut out letters of his handwriting to form the words he’ll never write, I’ll take and find as many photos of him, looking into those eyes I know I’ll never get the chance to stare into with my own.

soundless noise

Fri, 22 May 2009 14:11:18 GMT

As I was sitting in my dad's shitty massage chair, brushing my hair which every few days becomes one whole tangle, all of a sudden I felt overcome by some wave of emotional sickness. Like one underlying cacophony of all the little things threatening to weigh me down, that make me ill with this same familiar longing for the unattainable, the pervading question mark over my not-so-distant future. I am tired of dreaming about the idea of love, attaching myself to those I will never be with. Because these feelings are real even if they can never be channelled, reciprocated, or known. I was talking to Shaun the other night about how love inherently requires some form of acknowledgement, realisation, outlet or return, otherwise it ultimately becomes self-destructive. His view was that there essentially was no difference between loving something that is real or not real, because even in connection with someone else, we are still alone, we will still never know the other person. There will always be aspects of our loneliness that remain, and become destructive in other ways, in being able to have something we want but never truly understanding or experiencing it to the fullest. Of course he had a point, but I still chose to argue the other side, that the tradeoff for potential betrayal is still worth the experience of love when it arrives. I guess in my heart of hearts that stands as my truest position, even if such a stance is virtually undetectable from my daily demeanour.

I seems like I can't write about anything else but this unchanging landscape, and it is indicative of my stagnation and lack of development over the past few years. The years between say, 13 and 17 seem so much more filled with personal growth experiences, creative expression, and learning about myself, compared with the past 4 years. The last two in particular seem practically nondescript. I cannot remember anything that happened, bar dragging myself to uni, sleeping too late, working an awful job to earn money which was spent on frivolous items, all-nighters on the eve of assignment deadlines, cramming for exams, forgetting everything afterwards, tireless, persistent, disgusting procrastination, worrying about being screwed over by bureaucracy and social machinery, worrying about my apparent decline in poeticism, feeling, self-insight, motivation, even intellectual capabilities. I've grown more blunted to making sense of my internal logic when I could previously discern the reasons from the outset, and I don't know whether it's some shade of denial, or some inevitable product of "growing up". They say that as a teenager, you know everything. It becomes harder to assert certainty in anything as time goes by, the costs of being wrong, or just being unsure, are always too high. I wrote in my paper journal 3 days after my birthday last year, "same fucking shit. Money-centric, bored, academic apathy, emotional apathy, fear/avoidance of intimacy, narcissism mixed with self-hatred, extreme & self-damaging laziness, timidity, social awkwardness, antisociality". I couldn't have summed it up better. There is that constant ambivalence in me, the conflict between resigning myself to passivity, and the imperative to salvage what I can before I become unrecognisable to myself.

People keep asking me to name what I want, when that's my precise problem. Maybe I don't want anything for myself, other than the will to get to a point when I have no choice but to decide.

lighter still

Sun, 03 May 2009 08:35:45 GMT

awash

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:14:45 GMT

"the second type of killing; the daily wilting"

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:53:13 GMT

So what if you don't get what you want. So what if you're alone. It won't kill me. It might numb me, it might make me cold and lonely and sad, frustrated and broken, inauthentic and lost. But it won't kill me.

where sea meets sky

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:43:05 GMT

I’m 21 today and in my second day of a cold. My parents bought me a ring for my birthday. We decided to take a drive south, aimlessly following the white dotted line along winding roads bordered by forest trees. My parents bickered over directions at the front while I sat at the back, periodically swallowing my own saliva to test the soreness of my throat. Somewhere along the way, I saw the bluest water of my life.

the old is new again

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:46:21 GMT

inside out

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:38:42 GMT

Definition in the details, the romance of looking back. Recording is not living. I can beautify my experiences in an effort to imbue them with meaning, I can craft stories of love and aloneness, of cities in the rain, rooms bathed in dusk, the invitation of open water. But I can't feel the beauty in the moment — everything is too rushed, transient, unremarkable. I want to remember the dusty pink haze of sunrise on the road, illuminated buildings from the motel window like fairy lights in the distance, sleeping alone and half in love. Coral chipped nails, dresses that move with the body, the heat of others.

After all this time, I'm a good person to have not forgotten you. Sometimes I wonder what you'd think if you knew me now. It's not an act—it's a loss—to have changed. I was happy to be the tenderhearted, open one, to be both free and lessened by a bottomless devotion that asked for nothing. If the purest love is love without inhibition, you've made me passive and cautious, like one of those cynical girls who deride the mechanics of romance, yet inwardly yearn to be discovered.

gentler, softer

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:19:21 GMT

dusk town

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:33:36 GMT

float forever

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:29:53 GMT

anti-piscean

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:48:05 GMT

I wish I could cry again. I haven't cried properly in maybe two years. Things sting for a while, or I find myself stuck in this unrelenting dissatisfaction which I can't express or give any weight to. I keep brushing this chronic sense of nothingness aside, telling myself it's the adult way. I'm almost 21, I can't keep doing this. Feeling inexplicably devastated about every facet of my uninspired life or numbing myself to the world because I feel somehow unreal and incomplete. There's only so much shopping I can do, places I can eat, or movies I can watch before what used to be exciting starts to lose its colour. I keep thinking if I were prettier or thinner that things would be better, that I would be happier with myself.

If I were to be honest, my biggest dreams aren't about what I want to do or the kind of person I want to be. They're just about love, or more specifically, love that works. And I hesitate to say that because I almost feel ashamed. I don't have any positive scripts of love derived from personal experience. Being in love has always been about my aloneness or unrequitedness. I look at certain friends of mine who move from boyfriend to boyfriend and I think, how can that be love? I'm not interested in having someone to drive me around or pay for dinner or to make out with in the cinema, I'm not interested in attaching myself to the first person who gives me attention for the sake of not being alone. I want the real thing. I want intimacy and vulnerability and tenderness. I want sacrifice and understanding and commitment. Maybe they are lofty ideals that cannot be supported by reality, or standards which can only be maintained for a short period of time. Maybe I'm just asking for trouble or setting myself up for disappointment. I'm not this deluded, starry-eyed romantic who believes in the concept of "soulmates" and happily ever after. If anything, as time progresses, I feel colder, more remote, and more resigned to my solitariness than ever.

an unfinished imprecision

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:44:13 GMT

I choose to regress and I am only a little sorry. I find myself indifferent to sentimentality, the symbolism of one year ending, the next beginning anew. For I am the same, studying and making money and trying not disconnect from the world entirely. I've always been solitary, I've always been able to retreat inward, alternating between focusing on growth and pushing myself beyond my comfort zone, and despising myself a little more than I'll ever admit.

The problem is only a handful of things in the world truly interest me. I lack curiosity. Even my so-called dreams, of freedom and wealth and beauty, seem vague, distant and ultimately unfulfilling. I am bored but blessed, in that I can accept being unremarkable if it means being safe. If risk equals return, I am flatlining, possessing youth but neither buoyed nor cushioned by it, lacking both the urgency and ingenuity required to steer myself in a braver direction.

green river, red sea

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:36:21 GMT

punt hill, the stanton

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:51:13 GMT

to come around

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:52:59 GMT

clearer in the morning

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:52:28 GMT

If I think about it logically, I have no reason to need you. Maybe I’m just bored and unhappy, wanting to pin your unattainability as a concrete reason for my listlessness. I cannot direct these feelings anywhere. I cannot stop wishing you were beside me everywhere I go. I cannot help feeling disappointed that as I’m preparing for a night out with friends, deciding what to wear, applying makeup and spraying on perfume, that it’s not all for you instead. Most of all, even at my loneliest and weakest, I cannot even cry. What is there to be sad over? We have no history. We barely have any shared experiences. You are not obligated to communicate with me, let alone be kind to me. I have no claim over you, I have no right to expect from you any level of reciprocation or sensitivity or transparency. You are a certain way one day, another way the next. Yet it is entirely my choice and undoing if I allow you to foster hope in me. If you promise me nothing, I can’t be devastated if that’s what I get.

I need to expand my heart beyond its desiring of romantic love. When did it get so small? When did I start only caring about having someone to get close to in the dark of a movie theatre, someone whose hand in me lights me from inside, someone to meld my body with, someone to unlock and dote upon and claim as my own. They say love only happens to those not actively seeking it. How can I be happy obsessed with its supposed lack in my life? What about other types of love, or chasing other pursuits and dreams. What about authenticity, generosity, empathy, a lust for life, openness, selflessness, friendship, family.

This year has been entirely unremarkable. No worthy accomplishments, no dramatic developments, no weird and wonderful experiences. No intimacy, no touching, not even a single kiss, bar one on the cheek from a colleague after farewell drinks for a coworker. A departing gesture and a thank you for safeguarding his camera. I was so taken aback and traumatised by the preceding events that I ran blindly up the street to the station, almost getting myself run over in the process.

bloodshot

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:32:04 GMT

Isn't it funny ... seeking connection by staring at a computer, buying more things in the vain attempt at compensating myself for the misery of work, convincing myself of impossibility and rejection such that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When did a person's "complexity" become another way of saying, "I'm sad and I don't know what to do about it." I've never found a way to reconcile my timidity and social avoidance with the need to obtain self-confidence and personal fulfilment.

Social life consists so much of acting; adhering to scripts, playing out characters – in the workplace, in the observance of empty pleasantries, in the sanitisation of unhappiness. To an outsider, survival hinges upon acceptance and inclusion. What if I just didn't want to do this anymore. Wake up, get dressed, eat, get out of the house, go to work, go to class, sleep, repeat. What if I just didn't have the energy. What if I stopped caring about all the things that supposedly matter. Earning a living, obtaining higher education, forming healthy relationships, growing as a person. I could just sit around in an empty apartment all day, alone, in my underwear, playing sad music and looking out the window onto the street, trying to figure out how the fuck I came to be so lifeless. Where to next, when I desire nothing for myself but comfort, numbness.

Little devastations will always be short-lived. Eventually, I will stop caring that you stopped talking. They say that feeling uncomfortable is the only way to grow. Each time I feel close to giving in, I think to myself how far I have to go if I think that this is pain. If withholding my heart limits my potential happiness, the lost chance is worth the exercise in resolve.

so very much

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:21:44 GMT

I don't know how to say what I mean. Or social norms make it impossible to do so. This is not about my chance at happiness, and risking my self-preservation for it. This is about preventing myself from jumping into something my heart can't handle. I wish it weren't too late already. I wish I could stop looking into the mirror as a measure of my self-worth, taking hundreds of pictures of myself only to delete each one. I wish I could love you without thinking. The first stages are always the purest; the clammy hands, the pulsating heart, the breadth of the undiscovered. Every part of you, scarce and revelatory. I need to be anchored in the now, somewhere in the real world, not desiring the stuff of movies and adolescent fantasies. The more I venture into myself in an effort to bring you closer, the more I crave numbness, anonymity, erasure. Teetering on the edge of resigning myself to disappointment, all the while hoping for you to steady my restlessness, to decrypt the unspoken and oblique, to hear what I cannot say.

sleeping with this want

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:11:05 GMT

One day I hope to write about the role that motels have played in my life.

i keep telling myself

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:11:40 GMT

This, too, soon will pass.

each intimacy learned

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:31:35 GMT

Leaning my head against the window of the train, the cool night breeze blowing over my face, and I'm there. On the rooftop, in the middle of the city, with you. Night swimming. Nobody knows who you are. Later, you find me, standing on the balcony, in your shirt and a thin robe. Smoking, looking out to the harbour. "Since when do you smoke?"

"Since never."

I face you, eyes still dark, searching. Yours are clear, open, fixed on me. I feel like crumbling, I can feel myself fucking up again, peeling skin, wanting out because of wanting too much. All these little things in my head, internalised to hide the part of me enabling my need, my fear. It doesn't have to be complicated with you. But it always does, when you have everything to lose. When giving yourself over is a compulsion, a risk without anticipation of return, when bodies melding, devastating openness, quiet moments of candour, truth without armour, blooms over your skin, etches into every fibre, burgeons inside of you with new metaphors, the responsibility of attached significance. Like the most precious thing you've ever been assigned to look after, to keep alive. Like climbing to the top of a hill and releasing a lone balloon. Like clasped hands and deliberately shut eyes.

I don't cry. I smile my crooked, wistful smile, think about touching your cheek, and look ahead into the illuminated night. The air is a salve and it will carry with it my heart. My heart, which I know is already yours.

from gabriela

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 06:49:27 GMT

phantasms

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:52:47 GMT

This is why love doesn't work.

You either love someone more than they love you. What the fuck can you do, put into that place. How can you reconcile the inevitability of heartache with the drive for self-preservation, other than through denial? Even when you're on the couch making out or just going about your daily business everything fucking hurts. You'll be crying and he'll be trying to get off. He won't get it and you'll want to stop. Stop feeling so much, stop asking for it. Stop loving him in a way that makes you sick to your stomach with raw longing and shame.

And if he loves you as much as you love him? Then there is still the heartache of leaving, the unknown, the obstruction of others, the potential to disengage. There is still the struggle of keeping it afloat, of surviving, of pulling through. There is still the doubt, the insecurity, the need, the desperation. You know that deep, unrelenting, frightening type of love that takes hold of you, that falling feeling. You just want someplace safe to land, you just want his arms to be there at the bottom. Your eyes are shut. The pit of your heart is ready to be excavated. You can't relax. You can only hold on dumbly, almost blindly, fingers threaded, tangled breath, open mouths, your tentative, brimming heart humming under your skin. You have an addiction now. It won't end. It only grows stronger, with every taste, touch, smell, sound, look. And you won't turn away, you bury yourself deeper, you can’t stop craving.