Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cutouts

I wrote this entry about a week ago, and hesitated to post it because of how incredibly personal it turned out. But at this point, it doesn't matter anymore. There's nothing left for me to lose or worry about.


“I don’t want you anymore.” That’s what he said to me. That’s what he said on the sixty third day after I fell in love.

I suppose the Sunday morning church bells people are attempting to entertain the crowd by turning the monotonous dongs into a quirky melody, but that just adds another layer of sadness. And they stop, enwrapping the bleak dusty church windows into a silence, letting the car honks and the cart rattling and the wild November wind drown out any hint of a symphony.

Though they’re like a symphony of their own. The soundtrack to the [insert typical adjective here] New York City. If I had to describe the soundtrack in three words, I would say cold, restless, and lonely. It can be ninety degrees outside, and all you have to do is just listen to the city to see its coldness. There’s no time to stop on the sidewalk and read a poster because the crowd is permanently following a dogmatic unchanging rhythm. There’s no time to pause and think of where you’re going because they expect you to know that in advance. There’s no time for anything, including emotion.

Is it just more practical to resort to callousness in a city like this? Isn’t there a place for people with an emotional span of Europe who welcome walking down an avenue holding hands just for the hell of it or skipping around puddles without the scowl of a businessman? For people like me? Or do I actually have to become an emotional rock like him and close my heart to intimacy?

We think love is this concrete, significant state of being into which you fall and everything becomes rosy-colored. Truth is, it’s just a human emotion as transient as anger or shame. People fall in and out of love all the time. Where is the constant? Passion is always fleeting, constantly re-imposing itself on people and objects and places and more manmade concepts. If we can be angry with someone one day and then make up the next, what makes love different? The answer isn’t black and white, but it’s not all that complex. If we want to hold a grudge, we are only hurting ourselves; if we want to stay in love when it’s time to let go, well, there’s your answer.

They say you fall because you can’t help it. Personally, I think breaking up feels a lot more like falling. We try to deal through all the problems and approach them as rationally as possible, but in the end it turns out we’ve been slowly dying a little for a while and the breakup couldn’t be helped. So we fall down, down into a land of might-have-been’s and regrets, which is, from my experience, always a depressing place to be in. Then every time you see or hear evidence that your ex-significant other is doing well, it’s like a pang in the stomach when you’re already lying on the floor in defeat. Your eyes become murky and blurry. Insult to injury.

If they say love is irrational, how come people try so hard to rationalize through the reasons why someone doesn’t feel it? If it’s easy to accept that we can’t help who we “fall for,” why is it hard to understand that we can’t help waking up one day and not loving someone anymore? It’s gotta be the same going in and out. Logical or senseless. And if you ask me, since every other damn feeling out there – through rooted in logic – has no substantial reason other than impulse of thought, I’d go with the latter. Love is smooth, but it’s not logical and it sure as hell isn’t constant.

We raced through a fragile honey-colored plane of impossibilities. There were problems, but love is tricky like that because it makes you think it will conquer all. If any human emotion could conquer all, we’d be in trouble; the world spins round because we learn and grow and change our minds. And then I couldn’t take it anymore and threw a fit, and perhaps we rushed with the breakup. But he knew. He knew how I felt and he went on living the single life in front of my face. I remember one day, way back when we first started dating, I told him I’m worried because I feel like I’m falling too hard, and he smiled and kissed me and said our relationship just became serious. I should've known right there love was bullshit. But I wanted it so damn hard to be real, so I believed.

On the sixty third day, I told him everything. That I still loved him and was mad at myself for giving up so easily. He listened with a completely grave expression on his expressionless face, and after a few seconds of silence he buried his face in his hands and said “I don’t want you anymore.” His reply didn’t shock me – I knew what the verdict would be before going into the conversation – but I just wanted him to know, even though he already knew. I wanted him to hear it from my mouth in case there was an ounce of a chance that he still felt it. Because up until that moment, I believed love could be constant. And in the realm of my daydreams, I suppose it could have been; but in the real world, there is nothing permanent except change. His emotions were not hidden or even all that complicated. They were as transient as anger and indifference. You can look at a pretty box all you want, but eventually you’ll have to open it, and it will be empty.

So I’m going out on a Sunday evening. I will put on my new button-up overthrow and brown high-heeled boots, and I will go into a coffee shop and read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and flaunt my independence. And if some cute (or, more likely, creepy) guy flirts with me, so be it. Because life’s not about trying to hold on to one thing when the world is madly spinning around you; it’s about, for example, how the New York weather knows exactly how to appease your mood when all you want to do is listen to the never-ending car honks and watch the cold city lights change colors. It’s about the people who don’t know the worth of something until it’s gone forever.

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WHOO NEW POST ZOMGGG!!!111one

Because apparently, people still read my blog...

Honestly, guys, sorry for not updating. I've been horrible about this lately, but college is a whole new playing field for me. However, in honor of my birthday, I'm posting up another one of my poems. I was debating for a few days whether or not this should ever see the light of day, but I'm on such an emotional high right now that I feel nothing can crush me. Even your raw, ruthless criticism. I'm not giving any context, so take what you want from it.


Fleeting

The clouds move like a drunken New York biker.
Barely above ground level,
With no sense of a straight line or slowing down.

Fast like a subway train
Only it's the express one, so it skips a couple necessary stops.

Fast like the cigarette-infested October rainwater
Racing down battered concrete
into the Underworld.

Like a pencil gliding across a dead tree
To draw my skewed interpretation of Zooey Deschanel's nose
in 500 Days of Summer.

Why do we move so fast
Like braindead coke addicts?

I'm not on drugs.
I don't think.

I wonder if, when he wakes up,
He ever remembers how my eyelashes tickled his neck
As we drooled on his Ikea pillowcase
And pretended we didn't have class in twenty minutes,
Or that his roommate wasn't undressing in the bed next to us.

From the day we met,
We were as likely to last as the New York clouds could stay in place.

We raced through a fragile honey-colored plane of impossibilities.
When you speed the "in love" part,
It feels a lot more like falling.

And now
After the stale whiskey and screwdriver shots
And his lovely marks and my sleeping pills
And the uncontrollable, barely remembered hysteria,
After getting used to waking up without his warm elbow jabbing into my shoulder
After realizing his ability to ignore any emotion
After one week

I just keep thinking about the New York bikers,
Recklessly speeding and not caring who they hurt in the process
And leaving others to clean up the mess they've made.


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559

That's the number of new emails I have, according to my Gmail inbox.

It has been 559 for quite a while. All the emails on the first page are read, and I make a point to either click on or delete new mail that finds is way into my humble chocolate cupcake account. And yet this number keeps growing. I don't understand how this is physically possible if I consciously take care of every new email. It's one of those life's unsolved mysteries, like how even when you completely untangle your iPod headphones and set them down on a table, they will have 23509343 knots when you pick them up five minutes later.

559. That's a lot of words written to me I haven't read. I don't have to click through my archives to know most of them are either from Facebook, a store I signed up at for the 10% discount, or Mr. Molin's eagle updates. A few are actually important, that I mentally check off to read later but (obviously) forget. Like college counseling stuff. It's safe to say I prioritized horribly first semester senior year, hurting not only myself in the present but possibly screwing up my future.

Today I got into New York University. It has been my first choice ever since I learned that the city of New York exists - I dreamt of catching a taxi under the fancy lights of Broadway Carrie-Bradshaw style, and being able to go to school there seemed unreal. Too perfectly amazing. Somehow, I didn't even need to know the criteria to be accepted at the University. No matter what my grades turned out to be, I knew I'd get in. I know what all you psych nerds are going to say - hindsight bias, when I say I knew something would happen after it already occurred. Well, believe it if you want, but NYU was the only school I didn't doubt.

And then something happened. A lot of things happened specifically, but this one somehow snuck right past my conscious and burned itself into my brain before I could realize what was going on. I'm not about to go into the details of how my decisions affected my moral outlook on life and myself, but in a nutshell, I'm not ready. I don't fully trust myself in one of the most exciting lively overflowing-with-opportunities cities in the world. I love New York, but it will have to wait. I'm sure a chance will present itself in the future when I'm more set on what I want in life, and when it does, I'll take it without looking back.

559 meaningless emails taking up space in my memory. I can't even find the time to clean up and get organized electronically, let alone manually or mentally or any other kind of realm of thought. I always keep a Gmail tab open; when that number changes to 560, for the two or three seconds that come between my brain processing this information and my finger moving the cursor to the email tab, I feel important. That's an understatement; I don't feel alone. And then I click the page and read the subject line to find out that Questia is offering another manage-your-stress quiz, and all my feelings of individualism evaporate. Then the number goes back to 559.

And that's good. It's more than halfway there, but it's not quite there yet. Just like my thought process. It's about time one of those things had a constant.

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It shines like the sacred halo of gold

My first acceptance letter.

I stood crying at the mailbox. No, they were not tears of ecstatic joy that I got into a college, although that is one reason to celebrate. Amidst the otherwise terribly sucky events of the day, I receive the acceptance letter - because I deserve it. There's no bad luck/good luck principle involved, no life-throwing-curveballs shit. I worked for my grades, so I got in.

I presume to conclude that no matter the circumstance, we all get what we deserve.


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