When we stop writing, I think, it’s not because we no longer have words to share (I have plenty), or no one to share them with (I have a few). And it’s not for lack of languages (I know three). It’s fear. I am afraid of leaving something out so I say nothing. I am afraid of my head not processing my feelings and my heart not processing my thoughts. I am afraid of meanings lost in translation.
I am afraid of you thinking “lucky him”, completely oblivious to the fact that you are him.
I
He lies to you once, you get sad. Twice, you get angry. From then onwards, you expect it, and it doesn’t dismay you. And he’s not sure that he wants you but he’s not sure enough to let you go. He thinks you deserve better and you agree. But you’ve put so much of yourself into this so “Fuck it, I’m staying”. And you do, stay. For so long that when you finally leave, it takes him days to understand whether you left him or he did.
II
The morning after the night before. It’s going to take you some time to get used to the emptiness sleeping next to you. When the alarm goes off and you get up, there will be no arms to pull you back in. At least for a while. And no matter how big the bed is, you’ll always sleep on your side and leave his empty. So you’re alone. Be alone.
III
You meet a tall man with dark features and he knows all the right words to say. And you look so good next to him but feel so bad. It’s been a while since someone complimented your sad eyes or noticed how you pronounce your name differently. But he does, and through him you’re falling in love with yourself. He’s not what you want. But he is what you deserve.
IV
You read Kundera, and Sabina inspires you to betray. Him and yourself. Leaving is so, so easy. It takes guts to not look back. There’s a void and it demands to be filled. You wake up in strangers’ beds and leave before they catch your name. You fast-forward to the end of things that never even began. You roll credits before the movie even starts.
V
The unbearable lightness of being is that each decision is faced once and only one possible outcome tried. And you’ll never know whether you chose correctly. You’re used to the emptiness sleeping next to you. And when the alarm goes off, you no longer long for arms to pull you back in but ones to help you up. You can’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed if you sleep in the middle.
VI
So you’re alone. Be alone.
… about us. All of us.
I’m a lover not a fighter. But some people don’t know how to be on the receiving end of my love. So I fight.
Words make up our thoughts and thoughts make up our words. When I was 10 I thought “Contempt” meant “Happiness”. There is a misunderstanding between me and everyone who has heard me use the word back then that I can’t fix. I can only lose sleep over it.
I read somewhere that the heart strings can sometimes break after a deep emotional trauma causing the heart to lose form and as a result be unable to pump blood effectively. You can literally die from a broken heart.
My thoughts are as tangled up as the headphones in my pocket. I don’t take the L and R seriously anymore. The music always sounds the same.
Reading translated works is like settling for a man who looks like the lover I can’t have.
Hitler was an artist. He cared about animals. He wept for his mother. He loved, and was loved. That never stopped him. That never stopped anyone.
There are 7 billion people I want to sit across the table from. 7 billion stories I’m dying to hear. I’m dying. To hear.
Only six degrees separate us. Wherever we are. Whoever we are.
Everyone I know knows everyone I know. I’m mostly glad, slightly uncomfortable.
Everything I never saw coming wound up at my door. Everything I saw coming took a U-turn.
I laugh differently now. Louder. Livelier. Like I’m trying to prove something. To myself.
I have a crippling fear of dying anywhere but home. Where my heart is.
I never know.
I’ve been thinking lately.
About us.
How fragile we are, and how tough we act.
Home
Where?
The one I run to,
or the one I run from?
My parents’, or mine?
My first passport, or my second?
Language
Which?
The one I inherited,
The one I was taught,
Or the one that forced its way into ours
That sometimes I can’t tell
Where one ends and the other begins.
Belonging
To two places at once
Means never entirely belonging
in one.
It’s like taking a trip to the beach only to stand on the shore with the water barely touching your feet, blindfolded, waiting for a wave to crash into you.
You can’t see it. You don’t know when it will come. But you know it’s coming.
People go to the beach to swim, to tan, to have fun.
You hear their voices, their blurred out laughs.
But you, you just stand there.
And you wait.
For an inevitable wave.
A week from now, I won’t remember your scent, and how it would linger on me every time we met.
A month from now, I won’t remember the sound of your voice, and the shivers it sent down my spine.
A year from now, I won’t remember the color of your eyes, and how mesmerized I got every time I looked into them.
A lifetime from now, I won’t remember how my life was before you.
If you’re familiar with social media (since you’re reading this, you probably are), then you understand that the audience are called “Followers” because 1) They follow your stream of thoughts, and 2) If you’re charismatic and influential enough, they might even follow you. Some people use that to promote their ideologies or their work and they do it well, others become a copy of everybody else in the process of filtering their thoughts, doing and saying things, and refraining from doing and saying other things so as to please or at the very least not piss off their “followers”.
According to Wikipedia, Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent. In plain English, it means using words or behavior which will not offend any group of people.
In the world of social media, people will most likely judge you not on what you meant to say, but rather on how you say it and how they interpret it. I don’t speak for anybody but myself when I say that sometimes I fail to choose my words and expressions wisely and I end up giving a different impression than the one I was aiming for. When I finally come up with the right words, I may edit my entry and explain the confusion, but sometimes even that is not enough.
People might unfollow you if they thought your words offended them, even if that is not what you meant for them to do, without giving you an explanation or simply stating what provoked them enough to press that unfollow button and give up interest in what you have to say. This, I think, is the main reason why people spend some time to filter their thoughts and even more time thinking about how to word them perfectly in a way that wouldn’t offend anyone in any way, even involuntarily.
Is that necessary? I don’t know, maybe to some people it is, but personally I think it’s too perfect. Humans make mistakes; even the most eloquent people I know use the wrong words for things sometimes. But it goes even further than that. Your followers don’t pay you to please them, so you shouldn’t feel obliged to. As long as you don’t mean any harm, and you don’t cross moral lines, you should be able to say whatever you want, however you want to say it. Your blog, Twitter or Tumblr account is your personal space on the internet and you may use it freely to express what you think and what appeals to you, not what you think would appeal to others. Unless of course you use it to insult other individuals or groups, then get out of the web, you’re using up space!
I like to do a little research on the topic I intend to write about before I start writing; when I did so today I found rants about how awful our generation is, pointing out its every flaw. I found tens of “I hate our generation” posts and only a few taking the time to find out what is actually wrong with this generation, and why.
People wonder why our generation is so unhappy, insecure, and fraught with problems. They say it seems incongruous with the wealth and opportunities that we have been given. I think our emptiness makes perfect sense; the way we’ve been raised.
From infanthood on, we’ve been told “You are special”, “Anything is possible” and “Follow your heart no matter what”. These ideas are inescapable.
What you get is an entire generation that is taught idealism from birth. They go out into the world expecting a society that will pander to them. What they get, however, is a reality that vastly differs from the messages they heard throughout childhood.
These kids realize that you can’t just expect everyone to believe you when you say you’re special; you have to prove yourself. It’s not enough that your mom said so. They begin to realize that many things are impossible, and that not everything will make sense.
Most blindingly, they realize that following your heart usually only works if it is in conjunction with following your logic and good fortune.
We have added layers to what previous generations were taught: our grandparents were told they had freedom of speech; we are told that not only do we have a right to be heard; we should do so no matter how cruel, obscene, or unnecessary our methods are. Our ancestors were raised with the belief that they had intrinsic value; we are told that there is no one like us and we should be true to ourselves no matter how it affects others.
All this praise has birthed a young nation of adults who are self-important, not self-assured. When they take their easily-swayed self-importance into the world expecting to be loved and admired by all, they are shredded by a life that simply doesn’t work that way. Self-importance slowly degrades, and they have no actual confidence to fall back on because everything they built themselves around was a fantastic lie.
In the end, everything is a disaster. Where there was once a charismatic young man, there is now an embittered college grad disillusioned because potential employers cannot see how special he is, and we have a girl who follows her heart no matter what her mind is telling her, and suddenly the world is mocking her as she makes a fool out of herself.
We have millions of girls told the pleasant lie that words cannot bring them down, because they are beautiful – then they see over three thousand images a day of just how poorly their perfection stacks up against what the world deems beautiful. Until kids are told the truth about who they are, they will always be falsely enamored with life. Parents are afraid to tell their children that things are impossible, or that they have flaws, or that not everything will work out in their lives. Why? There’s nothing wrong with feeling small, or being flawed, or realizing you are less important than you thought.
It’s better to know reality young and be prepared for it than be told to smile because everything’s all right and you’re perfect, then have to slowly realize not everything is all right, nor will it ever be, and you actually are human and sometimes weak and evil like everyone else.
It was sudden, unexpected, a hit-me-when-I’m-down kinda thing. One day she was here, the next; gone.
I’m starting to think it wasn’t real to begin with, it never even happened. It was but a dream so vivid I couldn’t distinguish between it and reality. It was what I’ve always wanted that somehow my mind convinced my body it has experienced it. Was it?
I escape reality. I shut out the world. I go to sleep whenever sadness kicks in, whenever I miss her even slightly. I believe when I wake up she’ll be there, she’ll be back. She’ll hasn’t been gone at all. But she’s never here. She’s never back. She has been gone for long, and will be for even longer.
I open the fridge, and there’s this jam jar I bought last month and I think, ‘When I got that, she was here’, and now she’s gone but the jar is still just sitting there in the fridge. It’s a strange thing to focus on but it’s these little things that I get stuck on most.
I’ve listened to all the happy songs and dreamed of all the happy places, but she was there, in every single song and place, the memory of her still finds me. The void is never filled.
I’m coming to terms with the fact that she is gone. Maybe temporarily. Maybe forever. And all I have left is memories, to try and recreate that person that used to live and breathe right in front of me.
I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”
“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all.She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.
Another day has passed. I haven’t seen you. I haven’t heard from you. I haven’t been able to sleep, or breathe, right. And though you’re close, closer than ever before, you’re still as far away as you were when the ocean separated us.
I don’t miss you. And I’m sure you don’t miss me either. We don’t even know each other to miss each other. Like everything and everyone else, we’ve changed. We’ve changed in opposite directions. No point of intersection unites us.
I look at you and I see the shadow of someone I used to know. I look at you and wonder if I’ll end up like you. If I’ll grow up to be you. If you’re still my role model. I look at you and wonder if I am you. I look at you, but you don’t look at me at all.
I read the things I wrote about you. I wonder if those words still fit. I recall just how proud of you I used to be. I wonder if I still am. I try to come up with reasons, excuses for why you act the way you do, for why you changed the way you did.
I flashback to the days we spent together. I try to remember the words I said and things I did, for maybe I am to blame somehow. I find nothing. I blame myself nonetheless. I blame myself for things that are entirely out of my control, and in yours.
I find myself wondering if you ever find yourself wondering about me.
I find myself hoping, that maybe when the phone rings next time, it will be you.
