concept limbo

Most times when you’re growing up, people stop patting you on the back for completing mundane things. I guess that’s expected. You get a big fucking hurrah for graduating high school, which really will be the easiest thing you’ll ever do for the rest of your life. But once you leave that shit hole and enter “adult” world, people not only stop blowing sunshine up your ass, but they also stop saying nice things in general. They start seeing you as an inept bitch, something cruising through the world that they think they earned their place in. People stop saying nice things, even if what you finished was of enormous worth. You stopped throwing up. You stopped drinking so much. You stopped slitting your wrists and popping pills. You’re growing up. Good job. I bet you haven’t heard that in a long time. All you’ve heard are questions about your major, your job, and your plans for the great fucking future. Questions and hard, hard criticisms because no matter what you’re choices or opinions are, they are not “tested” and “experienced.” Basically, they’re not good enough for anyone anymore. So you start doubting yourself…You were probably top of your class in high school or something of that sort. Super smart AP/IB type who took Calculus junior year. Suddenly all the looks of awe and accolades are gone. You’re just a fucking child and you’ve been through nothing and you’re self-absorbed and you’re all these things that 18, 19, and 20 year olds are. They don’t think or seem to remember what it was like to enter the skeptical world. So here you are, crying on the floor, looking for that last bottle of vodka somewhere at the bottom of your closet in your parents’ house.

Fearing of Flying

After this year, any remnants of fear I felt for failure must absolutely be gone. If I had ever felt afraid of failing, then it must be a long ago memory because I realized today at 4:38 A.M. that I began this year grappling with the prospect of imminent failure multiple times in majoring of Physics.

I don't fear the close explosions of a bad homework grade. I used to hesitate at the top of my pencil, waiting for hours and hours on the blank lined pages. If I knew how easy it was to just start writing and scribbling and doodling what came to mind, then I may be much better off now. The fear gripped my hand and kept it suspended for so long, putting off the fear and the progress and the success.

But now that I think about it, I feared failing. And by default, the options of quitting or trying again. Maybe I was afraid of hard work because I never was a quitter. The woe of being a determined, lazy teenager.

Forget deflowering

There's something painfully poetic about burning flowers, watching as the white petals darken to a crisp and evaporate into the night as if it was always an unadmired essence of nothing.

Maybe I find it so because I used to think I was like that white flower, subtle and quiet, as I hung on the low branches waiting for a stranger's quick glance in recognition that maybe it was a beautiful flower in existence. But burnt, the charred petals and limp sternum was something more recognizable to me in the mirror. Nobody sees burnt flowers as a conventional beauty, if at all, but as an unnatural occurrence mutilated in chemistry by a twisted God whose love for fire and destruction wrought a strange irony in what should have been an aromatic but useless piece of shit in nature.

This is not what I am because I don't want to be a flower anymore. They're fragile and pointless and dainty and conventional for the simple minded mongrels whose mindless admiration is as insulting as being plucked as a bud. I'm not a burnt flower or any force of vegetation, but I'm beginning to think that I am the aftermath of massive destruction: The ash, the smoke, the mild burn at the back of your nostrils. This is what I am as a girl, grown from the dirt of rejection and ray of pity.

Waiting

It's a strange thing to think that I've been waiting all this time for summer. I've been waiting and passively passing time until the fifteenth of May so that I could strip and run open-armed into the ocean under the scathing sunlight. I've been waiting for months and I've just another before I look back and realize that I'll only have two more weeks of my first year of college and I've done nothing progressive except take a few classes and hardly pass with grades that would get me no job and no accolade.

I've been waiting all this time for something I think will be great, but these months have been great and where was I to enjoy them but in a constant mental state of anticipation for the next best, unobtainable thing.

Summer plans

1. Get my damn license already
2. Go to the beach, read, eat a million acai bowls
3. Launch summer menu
4. Apartment furniture shopping
5. Paint in the nude
6. Do more photo shoots
7. Pick up kickboxing

Some days

Most days, it's okay. I wake up, look out the window, and feel perfectly glad to be alive.

On some days, I wake up to wish that I didn't. It seems like for no good reason to have fallen out of love so randomly. But that's what it is. And for the rest of the day, it gets harder and harder to fend off the urge to get in bed and cry and heave and sleep. The world around seems different on some days, muffled. But I'm staring at all their faces and it's as if they don't see me as the air gets used. That's just some days, scattered throughout existence.

We are not friends

For a long time, I thought that we were friends. The beginning was nice. It was casual with pretty dresses and wry smiles and good arguments. The beginning of everything is damn nice. And towards the middle we shared our problems and talked about the serious stuff and made promises that we couldn't keep.

For a long time, I thought this was friendship. I thought that you and me would be okay not talking for awhile because you did your thing and I did mine and it was good to be able to say, "Hey, I don't talk to my best friend everyday and that's fucking fine." Let's be honest, it's been kind of shitty.

I pushed the idea back that maybe I'm just overreacting again. I might just be dramatic and crazy and sensitive...all the things I hate in myself. So I pushed the idea back, pushed back the thought that we are not friends. We have not been friends for a long time, you and me. We stopped talking, and stopped thinking about what we'd talk about next, and how the other person might be feeling at some random given moment.

Maybe it was just me at the beginning who felt all that crazy stuff because I tend to do that a whole lot. It makes me sad, if I'm being totally honest. If I'm being super honest, I don't really know if I'm mad at you or if I'm mad at me for giving so many fucks from the start of something doomed.

We used to know each other. We could have been friends, but you haven't texted me anything meaningful in awhile...just a nonchalant, "hey, how've you been?" followed by silence while I listen in on the faint chatter on your end of the conversation with other people.

I meant to tell you how I felt, but I couldn't do it because you're doing so well now with your health and your school and your new friends. I'm glad I didn't find you by the river, hanging on a tree. I'm glad, and that's what I tell myself because if I admit otherwise, I'd really have to reevaluate myself as a person and that's something I cannot do without you.

We are not friends. We have not been friends for a long time now. I had to let the world know somehow.

Green

I'm not completely exactly sure how to put the words together to express how I'm feeling. Upset, indubitably. But this feeling that I feel feels inexplicable by nature as if I'm denying myself the ability to fully come to terms with the situation of where I've landed myself in terms of academics, friendship, and psychological stability. Something is wrong with me as it's always been and I can't help to shake the feeling of wanting to leave all over again. I want to get off the peninsula and towards wherever else and right now I'm thinking Portland, but I really don't know. I don't know what I'm feeling here or there . I can't articulate what is good for me or wrong or right. All I know is that there is a ball of lead in my stomach right now and I don't know what will happen next and this feeling that I felt all those months ago, the sheer excitement, is gone.

Things I like

There are things I like, things that make me happy even if it's for just a minute:

1. Stationary, notebooks, paper. Thick, cream-colored paper. Sometimes bound by hand, sometimes loose leaf. It's a blank canvas.

2. Flowers. The kind where the smell fills the whole room, the whole street. Jasmine might be my favorite. Gardenias are nice too.

3. Swimming. At any time, I can stop and be okay and float on. I don't have to listen to anybody. I can go as hard as I want until I only feel the burn in my lungs.

4. Sunlight on my skin. Sunlight burning through the sunblock. The smell of the sun and California's dry air with bits of brine.

Things I like from a place I viciously detest.

Late night treat

Most nights, when I'm not too ready to fall asleep, I'll make my bed and crawl in and imagine myself somewhere beautiful. When I was thirteen, I'd imagine waking up in a house made of twigs and branches as if the Lost Boys built it for me. I'd imagine that when I open my eyes, the sun would cast gold beams of light through the openings, coloring my private tent with the fabric of fairy dust and hanging vines.
Other nights I'd imagine floating aimlessly on a raft somewhere warm with shallow waters where the fish would swim around me and push the raft along. The water rocks me to sleep, and I'd wake up refreshed as if I'd gone on a real adventure.
Recently, I've been thinking about clouds and how nice it would be if they were of solid essence, if they were warm and cozy, if they could hold the weight of my head and push me through the night sky and bring me closer to the galaxy. The universe is in me, and I'm trying to bring it closer to reality rather than just in my imagination.
This is my super secret late night treat for nights that I cannot sleep and need a bit of adventure. I'm more in love with imagination than I've been with anything or anyone in a long time. I am in love with the way it is all mine, all real inside of me for no one else to defile or hurt.

New Year Resolutions

I really didn't think that I would make a list this year, but I decided that there are definitely some things that I want to improve upon:

1. Apply, even if you don't think you'll get it (I.e., scholarships, jobs, summer research internships)
2. Go to office hours for the classes you know you'll have a hard time with (I.e., physics, calculus)
3. Do all of your homework promptly, passionately, and purposefully (I.e., not shitting out on your Ethics readings and ditching Himalayan religions)
4. Focus on your priorities
5. Internalize the fact that nothing will go exactly as you planned and that's okay because there are other routes to take and ways to achieve your goals

Good luck, me.

A stranger in my home

I tried to refrain from admitting this, but I think I've overstayed my welcome in my own house. It's not that my parents don't love me and appreciate me, but it's as if the initial glow of "Wow! I haven't seen you in so long" is gone and now I'm just here.

I always thought it was important for a young adult to get out of the town in which they grew up in so that we could make new memories and have new experiences and find who we are outside the confines of our old mistakes. Since I've been back, I don't know. It feels hollow here, as if the memories I had were last week's dreams. At the same time, I've regressed and found that I've fallen short in every possible fathomable aspect. I don't like it here.

Fire

People argue and you got caught in the midst of crossfire, but they dismiss it and call you collateral damage.

"Don't take it in personally. We didn't mean to hurt you. Sorry."

A few years down the road, you get fucked up real bad and they tell you not to be a pussy. They tell you it's wrong to take your anger out on people you aren't mad at. Whatever. You get asked why you're so fucked up and you really don't know because nobody reconsiders collateral damage.

You start thinking that you're just a naturally fucked up person, doing fucked up shit, because you're a fuck up. Always have been.

Dear world,

This is fucked up. Leave me alone.