instead-questions

 

Very rarely do we say what we mean. Isn't that one of the unique traits of being a human? -- the species that not only wages war against our own... but the species most skilled at lying. But it's not the malicious lie that I am referring to, not even the white lie if for a more innocent counterpart.

I am thinking of a kind of indirectness in-built, the kind of foggy that is DNA-like... one could say, the lies that we tell because we don't know, and the not knowing that grows out of the utter complexity of personality. The 'lies' we tell in the questions we ask, "How was your day?" for instance, and the answer we seek not being the quality of said day --"Good, Fine, Could be Better'--, nor the details of it... The answer we seek instead being whether or not we were thought of that day, what was keeping you so occupied that day that you couldn't call, what was the particular event that etched this smile on your face, what can I do to make you laugh so hard– 

a series of infinite instead-questions.

This almost feels like a no-brainer. We know we do this, we do it all the time. 

But isn't the depth of each moment, each question, each etymology so shallow? Too shallow to capture all this multitude of what we actually mean... What we actually mean becomes a maze in space and time, also a constant back and forth of "does uncovering what we actually mean even matter?"

 dear you,

my mind is foggy and i consider crawling back into bed for a semi-sleep

too tired to arise and too awake to fall

i am afraid because i always end up thinking about him. 

it has been 3 years now, can you believe it?

3 years of love, 3 years of pain, 3 years of avoidance only to run circles around him.

this relationship has unfurled so much of what i thought i knew

what i thought i had a grasp on

and it is true when i say this process has been so excruciating i don't know how to continue on living.

how could it be, that a singular person becomes my entire world?

how could it be, that I will let everything fall just for him?

he goes on living

occasionally reaches out to me again and I grab his hands thanking him for oxygen.

but he is doing alright, 

he works better by forgetting and that has always been a better route than begging.

in my clearer times I know he's only a drop in the ocean

that there will be others, 

kind of. 

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

but other times I think about how rich he makes me feel just by holding my hand

I think about how the stars led us

I think about how this is not your ordinary, and just as quickly I think I am arrogant and naive.

But is it so crazy? if someone else could exist in my body when I am next to him,

will they come out of it saying, "I see"?

but does that really matter?

he has grown accustomed to my begging

almost lives off it from time to time;

it does not break his heart that I am breaking on my knees

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

it does not hurt him to leave me crying

maybe it does but it seems easier for him to turn away

and come back the next morning hoping I should be okay

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

i know people have to move on

i know distance and forgetting is necessary

yet I reach out my hands to him and though it stings him, he kisses them

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to give.

apr16

 hello, stranger.

so much has changed - for one, I feel particularly constipated to the thought of writing. I seem to remember times ago when writing came to me like an arrival of a calm sea, when symbolism curled into the central dip on my tongue and low murmurs pieced words together inside my head. Now, I sit and attempt to summon them. 

Nothing much makes sense: the 10 tabs I have for that presentation next week, that language dossier, that reading I have to do. Moments of confusion, a feeling of a distant memory that these were once important. I grow more and more convinced that we live within an illusory world we have to fight to emerge from with our own will. We tread a deceptive line where the daily endeavour is to reach such recognition. I don't know whether to be sympathetic to myself and the people around me. I don't know whether it is naive to hold hope that we know, that in our own ways we will supplant it.

As for now, we are still caught. Day in and day out, the same worries and frustrations. I struggle to find a voice to drown out those loudest, amplified by the very things that I have grown accustomed to believing. 

oil and water

 Dear you,

The environment seems to have become averse to me. In places where I had found most support and stability now present threats and sources of disconcertion - in worse cases, agony. There is a feeling that I hold which I am not sure whether can be simply called stubbornness. There is a feeling that they, their opinions and preferences, do not matter. That they are simply in passing, and that they have not gone through as much consideration as I do. 

The rain begins to patter and I wonder if hope it's in reassurance.

Of course, I steady myself. Caution not to become ungrateful and selfish. These are the people who care... But I also have to set my own boundaries, conquer my own battles and learn for myself. And this is where I am at. Such an uncomfortable position, so tenuous that the very ground which I place my feet seems to beg me to find someplace else. 

Is Love worth this? Is Love manifested in such fickle and transient a thing as a fellow human being worth some things that might never return? Worth poor impressions and waning relationships. I suppose now it is to ask, which ones? Whose impressions and which relationships? I ought to say more to my mother. But it seems to take so much from me. Vulnerability has been ringed to its maximum, bravery finds 'better days'. More than once it feels like my blood has become only a dilution, everything has lost its density. I float and hope for somebody to hold me. 

 the child evades responsibility

is let off on ignorance, know-no-betters and some snacks

is not held to account... 

when does personality meet with society?

a rip through my sail

 writing seems foreign and forced, I have come to the stage of having too little time, energy and bravery to traverse the limitations of language and thus put all my thoughts and waves into script. here, tonight I try again. I am thinking about wild abandon, about short-livedness and youth, and about the way in which I want to live. 

from the kitchen I hear my mother speak of her angel, sensible and unproblematic, me, and tears arise with as much thought as when my body convulses on its own will. how fright and vulnerability overtake me, the kind which I can no longer rationalise away or at least alleviate through a next course of action. I lay there sprawled out and naked, as the grey seeps and colours over and as my heart swells such as to be felt as far as to my left hand. so different and yet so similar, and I understand more clearly the disjunct between life and heart. the latter does not seem enough. a year ago I argued otherwise, and today I seek reasons to support this wavering conviction.

i have learnt a little more about the present moment, about listening to my body, and about doing away with the impressions of others. and with it it seems that the notion of forever is fading. the things we do that secure this illusion of forever strikes me as tenuous, almost frivolous now. for instance, marriage seems to be a convenient settling, or a dulling of some sort, the attempt to hold on when everything is meant only to pass. why keep it in your grasp only for it to wilt between your fingers? it strikes as a forced delineation around something as vast and as irrepressible as love. it assumes that people cannot change beyond recognition, if not that then beyond what your love can tolerate, or beyond what your own needs can be neglected for.

is this an inescapable human dilemma? we have learnt about utility and self-preservation, but there is something about society, empathy and a love for others that has not yet been expounded enough, in my personal knowledge and experience. I had never before realised the extent to which one can love and forgive as to run contrary to the self. where another can supersede the self to such degree, and internal conflict can so arise. sometimes when that seems too much, when it feels like the self is such an impenetrable and formidable barrier, i wish to collapse into myself, fade into oblivion. i wish for ignorance, a stubborn resistance to the future, for my body to be a mere rag doll thrown and flung along with the whims of life, for my thoughts to dissipate as fast as they form, without a trace.

but i am not so. the times i am able to pretend, i rise again. "i'm weak from all the things that i know," - how things ought to be, what about the self to protect and preserve, what to accept and what to object to, they flood my mind and do not seem so instinctive anymore. what defines a human being? everything seems to be getting thinner and less substantial. what can be counted on?