I like that I’m generally hard to read. But sometimes I feel really lonely when I cannot think of a single person I can speak to regarding irrational nostalgia for people I barely know, the random sadness that plagues me at 4pm, or the look in your eyes that makes me both overjoyed and breaks my heart all at once. You can wear your heart on your sleeve but you only have yourself to blame when it gets worn out. This is why the walls you build to protect yourself are the same ones that end up fencing you in.
Unbeautiful by Lesley Roy reminds me that all good things come to an end. Even if I once felt perfect in your eyes, I remember too clearly the nights when I never felt good enough, smart enough, understanding enough. But yesterday when I saw you smile, I finally, finally, fully understood the meaning of how fearful it feels to love something death can touch. And even though I might not always have felt this was right, I remember why I never once felt it was wrong.
I cannot believe I wiped clean any memory of uni results being released on Monday. I’m currently feeling the full effect of pre-doomsday jitters, courtesy of a memory lapse. Here’s to hoping I don’t mess up too bad this semester that my parents restrict my freedom the next. While I’m definitely expecting less than stellar grades this time round, my fingers and toes are crossed that I don’t fail anything.
I started working while studying last semester, and for anyone who tells you it is possible, is either (1) not studying in a Singaporean university, or (2) has insane time management skillz that I need bottled up and Fed-Exed to me, pronto. Working while studying is all sorts of wonderful and exhausting though. The extra moolah on the side really doesn’t hurt, and it feels liberating to buy something with your hard earned cash. Plus, I’ve always been an advocate of work experience > studying. But that might be just me yearning to throw myself head first into anything new that pops up.
I have a plan to kill myself by taking on more part time jobs next semester. In fact, I have just filled out a CV for sales exec at Zara. (Yes, retail is sorely enticing. Not for the pay but for the hustle bustle.) My common sense is winning on this one though so I’ll hold out for awhile before I send it in.
In better news, here is a snap of the best mussels I’ve ever tasted.
The sauce. The sauce. The motherfreaking sauce. What a party in my mouth. Then again my opinion is biased because I have never eaten mussels before this. Not enough to turn me into a seafood lover, but definitely keeping a lesser distance from them mollusks from now.
Available at The Pump Room at Clark Quay, or in my tummy.
Reading Chelsea Fagan’s article on Thought Catalog about the backseat that ‘boring’ love takes when compared with unrequited and melodramatic love really struck a chord. This generation appears to be obsessed with building walls around the heart, heartache and loss, to the extent that it goes beyond mere poetic inspiration. The most obvious place we see this? Tumblr.
Spend days trawling the corners of the site and you’d find a common pattern: lovelorn quotes and lyrics, presented from the likes of Sylvia Plath to handwritten script on a frosted window pane. Do we have an inherent yearning for a death wish? Or is there a dark, twisted desire to get our hearts trampled on by people who keep us coming back for more, but never have anything to give?
Perhaps it is the ease of micro-blogging that creates such a buzz among the emotionally weary. No other outlet allows for such free and creative expression of pent up emotion. After all, it is comforting to know that people get you, that you are not swimming alone in this sea of sadness, when you see a melancholic post get over 1,000 notes. Lord only knows how many 2ams were spent on tumblr, trying to purge my unsaid feelings to an audience of one blinking cursor, painfully aware of the emotional demons that manifest in the dark. As much as I understand too well the feeling of falling apart, it is also obvious that too much and too often is never too good.
Love is not movie screen captures of Natalie Portman desperately asking why love isn’t enough, nor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Expectations versus Reality. Sadness does not feel as good as it looks in sepia, complete with subtitles. Betrayal does not soothe over by placing white Helvetica text on bad vintage photo. And certainly, the insanity that comes with losing your mind for the sake of your heart does not feel better because you write about it on the back of a Starbucks napkin in black Sharpie.
Love is ugly and brutal when it is bad, and bleedingly beautiful when it is good. I understand and accept that there is beauty in the breakdown and sometimes the most electrifying art comes from the most broken of souls. But the danger in thinking that a 500 x 340 px image will do the majestic feeling any justice is that we tend to romanticize the ache, giving it overt importance and allowing it to define who we are.
Gotye hit home with the currently oft-quoted lyrics, “you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness”. We become so familiar with breaking our own heart that we subconsciously shut out any form of happiness that tries to mess with our comfort zone; we don’t know how to navigate the terrains of pure bliss because it is foreign territory; or we convince ourselves that we are satisfied in our perpetual morose state because pain is what we know, when what we really need to realise is that sometimes, it is the ones we know best that have the power to hurt us the worst.
Five years ago, I fell in love and managed to graze the perimeter of the fleeting emotion. For a decent period of time, I believed contentment lay with the people I gave my heart to. I found myself wanting nothing more than where I was and who I was with. The blanket of happiness I was constantly draped in was too overwhelming to think it was anything but genuine.
But after awhile, the glitter fades when you realise that you can’t possibly find it in another if you do not first understand that something so complex yet basic has to come from within. Even with the heartstrings binded to another, there are days when what grips my heart is a deep disquiet, and I am unable to quell the unspeakable desire to indulge in sudden and reckless escape.
My problem is that I yearn for a little too much, a little too often. Desire and passion are all well and good, but it’s the fine ones that cause you to set yourself on fire until you no longer recognise the debris that remains. On hindsight, perhaps the blanket of happiness masqueraded as a shroud of delusion surrounding my perfect concoction of love, faith and hope.
Short of attempting an Eat, Pray, Love, I opted for soul-searching budget style. I came to terms that switching up geographical coordinates would not cure the restlessness in me. Mere travel allows me to taste temporary euphoria, but then leaves me wanting more than before. Contentment doesn’t involve grand actions, but instead allows for tiny realisations of the value in every moment, teaching you to make magic from the mundane and radiance from the rust. It is a state of mind that neither flights across oceans nor exotic people and places can provide.
After a couple of months searching for the quiet lull of inner peace and struggling with fruitless chases, I found it strolling the supermarket aisles at 1am, doing wee-hour grocery shopping. I found it in the smell of memories permeating the air in a secondhand book store. I found it while sitting alone at a café, watching the rain create patterns on the window pane. I found it in the joy of having my iPod play my favourite song first on shuffle mode. I found it people-watching in the middle of the central business district, wondering if behind the powersuits and briefcases hid a person who liked his tea cold or his sheets messy. I found it in a kind word, a sideway glance, an uninhibited laugh.
Everyone seeks contentment, but a rare few ever manage to go to bed with it at night and wake up knowing it did not slip from your clutches while you were asleep. Some people spend their lives awaiting the moment when the puzzle pieces fit, before they finally stop their quest for the intangible. And right there, in my own backyard, in the most ordinary actions and in the depths of my very soul, I had stumbled upon it.
There is only so much longing and yearning the wretched heart can take before it calls it quits. Yet it is unfortunate and inevitable that the elusive bastard will slip from my clutches before I know it. So while I can, I plan to take a mental snapshot of this moment — when I wake up deeply satisfied with my life, wanting nothing more than what I already have.
Every so often, I have the urge to do something drastic or spontaneous because life is horribly stale without pushing its boundaries. Besides endangering my existence, I have actually managed to accomplish some small (and not so small) acts of rebellion against my Asian parents. These include getting my motorbike license (for a good six months behind their backs), getting my helix pierced, going down the poly route yada yada.
The best part about having strict parents is that it feels so much better when you get away with things they would put an immediate stop to if they even smelt the faintest whiff of the idea brewing in your head. I must admit, the mischievous side of me occasionally does certain things more to see if I can get away with it than because I actually want to. So much thrill in the chase, but none in getting what you want without a fight.
Sometimes, though, I get the feeling that they object just to exercise what little parental control they still have, because they know nothing and no one changes my mind once it’s made up. They probably figured it out when I was the most stubborn five-year-old brat who insisted on going for every single lame 20¢ kiddy ride in shopping malls.
Anyway the point of this ramble is just to say that I am planning on getting purple and turquoise highlights in my hair (and subsequently proceed to surprise shock my mom). Cheers, yet another reason why I’m not in the running for Good Daughter of the Year.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents so much, and a little more so because they love me unconditionally even though I am possibly more than they bargained for. But they need to realise they are dealing with a Taurean daughter here. Stubbornness is not just a character trait or something you hope will quietly make its exit once we hit adulthood. The damn thing is our entire frickin’ identity.
And yes, I am mentally prepared to get whacked in the face by karma in the form of my future children.
I want you to know that even if I am a little distant sometimes, even if I don’t share why I’m sad because I don’t want to hurt you anymore (can’t you guess though?), even if sometimes I wish you came before everyone else just so I would not be so emotionally jaded, even if I lose my way often and talk about giving up, I do love you — very dearly and with all my wretched heart, although never nearly quite as much as I would like to.
My mind might love taking unwarranted walks by itself but my heart is always here, right beside yours and beating in tandem for as long as you allow it to and then some.
