Love Is Not A Saturated Tumblr Image

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?

A Restless Girl’s Quest for Contentment

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.

(Also published in Fever Avenue)

No. 49, Memory Lane

I miss writing about you.

About the time we spent together, languid and enveloped by the hazy dream like caricature of youth. About the words I used to imagine you could say, full of magic and mystery when they were really reality checks one after another — just the way I liked it. About how you made me feel absolutely secure, like I had known you my whole life and more. (You know, perhaps I did.) About how you made me laugh the way nobody else could, because I was so enamoured by silly things that became funny once you spoke of them.

Some days I’m convinced I will never again open a new text post, stare at blinking cursor and prepare myself for a long night of purging unsaid feelings towards you that I never publish. Some days I’m not quite sure. In another universe, maybe this would have played out differently. Sometimes I imagine an alternate realm where our lines never crossed (and then subsequently split), where we ran parallel to each other forever and still led perfectly blissful lives. You and me, complete strangers on the street, never knowing happiness at the mere age of 17 and thus never experiencing total heartbreak. Or you and me, only ever friends. We were actually amazingly natural at that. The memory serves to remind me that sometimes the good is truly good enough and better is not necessary. 

I miss the warm feelings associated with you, but I’m not sure if that translates into missing you or missing a part of myself I used to know. The moment is fleeting, like every other strong emotion I have. But I do know Steve Almond was right about one thing — “it is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken”.

Hard to write, harder to write right

There was a point in time when I assumed freelance writing was a job that was tailor made for someone who merely constructed impeccable sentences. Thankfully, a few weeks ago, I sobered up after I read something (sources are best kept private here) about how difficult it is to find a good freelance writer. In other words, one who can churn out 300 words about a given topic are a dime a dozen but endangered is the person who can convey a message in the tone that appeals to the correct target audience, who is wonderfully versatile enough to be versatile.

Being a freelance writer is not about keeping your floaty, flowery style that would resemble a screenshot of a Sofia Coppola film for a piece that requires short, snappy sentences. It is not about pouring emotion into every misplaced semi-colon when you are not writing a feature. It is about adapting to different voices of different publications, while maintaining the nuances of your style that no one can imitate and still being proud of having your name run in the byline. There is only so much the best editor can teach, and pizzazz isn’t on the list. The ability to create wonder from word-vomit with finesse is inborn to a certain extent. 

It is easy to fall into a cycle of self-doubt and hurtful questioning when you sacrifice your voice for another’s. But when you are a freelance writer, you are the product. You are a living, breathing brand promise — and there’s nothing quite as rewarding nor overwhelming. You sell yourself in every comma you place, every apostrophe you erase. Every choice of word is a glimpse into the inner workings of your brilliant, dynamic mind, which ultimately provides for your next paycheck. I’m still learning how to balance a job well done with the elusive sense of satisfaction — especially when I have to tone down on my use of metaphors for more newsy, less personal pieces.

Writing is a fine art that good grammar and impressive vocabulary do not even begin to cover half of. It is not for the criticism-wary because there is possibly nothing (at least in my myopic range) that leaves you more vulnerable than taking on different personas and still getting judged for being yourself. 

The above paragraphs were inspired by minimal experience, the hunger for more and procrastination (but of course). Writer shall not be held responsible for jobs lost or illusions shattered.

Strange faces, distant places

It is almost two years now since the day you left me feeling less sad than I should have been. That day I carried around the guilt of being surprisingly comfortable with your absence. We were young and hopeful and I remember being in love. But I don’t remember how it felt. Every so often nostalgia creeps into the back of my throat and I taste bitterness, and I think that perhaps the aftertaste of a love gone sour is what truly stays with us in the end.

Like crazy

I wish I could tell you it no longer means as much to me, or that after all this while, I have finally grappled with the possible truth — but I have reached my lying quota for the year by constantly feeding myself beautifully packaged ones to keep my chin up, back straight.

It is a painful moment when you realise you could possibly love someone more than you love yourself. Everything else from there on out is done for them, without yourself in mind, and in the long run, you give and you give and you give until you have nothing left of yourself. And even then you keep on giving. It becomes impossible to be yourself anymore when so much of your heartbeat consists of the existence of another. There is nothing self-sacrificial nor unconditional about giving because one always subconsciously expects something, anything in return.

I am most afraid of the beginning of the end, because the few moments before final resignation are tainted with the desperation of a dying man who realises he will miss the air.

A symmetry

i.
It is 10:31 on a rainy Monday morning and I think, I think there are only finite ways you can think about one thing before you exhaust all possibilities but there are infinite ways you can feel about it. Because sadness comes in varying degrees and depths of each degree and depth, but then so does happiness, joy, bliss, heaviness, emptiness, and when you combine two degrees of sadness with 50 of joy and the remaining 48 of nonchalance, you get a concoction of mildly disquieting Wednesday afternoons.

ii.
I can’t tell you how I am feeling most of the time because there are no words in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe why I am especially sad in the afternoons but at the same time incredibly hopeful, or how dreams about a past lover never make me sad anymore but instead odd because I no longer recognize the stranger in my dreams, or why it is that the ones you want are rarely the ones you need but you want them precisely because of that. But I like the word ‘kaleidoscope’ so it will appear excessively and unnecessarily in conversations. 

iii.
I’ve been reading online blogs, mostly of people who write, and I am amazed at the spectrum of the human emotion. The world is not big nor strong enough to hold it all which is why I think it gets distributed among its population, unevenly and often to those who can’t handle the monstrosity of melancholy. I would like to experience more than the emotional range of a teaspoon, but only when armed with a pen and paper in case it threatens my very existence after awhile and I need to rid it from my bones through ink.

iv.
Today I am going to spend some alone time strolling the streets and perhaps the evening will find myself nestled among the shelves in a library somewhere. It is the good type of silence and comfortable solitude is the best type of company.