Thunderbolt & Lightning, Very Very Frightening ME

Galileo.

I kid. I kid.

It's a lifetime ago that I sat here to pour my heart out into the uncaring, all-understanding internet. Funny how it wasn't so long ago.

And that's just what I'm here to talk about. I think. The swift changes. How each change is a lifetime and lifetimes are short. Is it always like this or are the early twenties more terrifying than pop culture promised? Or perhaps pop culture is too confused to contain it with any clarity. Is that why people look for answers on Tumblr? Is that why people look for answers?

I now realize where I went wrong. It was around that "Is that why people" bit.

"There are many ways to lose the oldest game. Failure of nerve, hesitation, being unable to shift into a defensive mode, lack of imagination..." - Sandman, A Hope In Hell

But I'm not here to be serious. That applies to both this blog and this material realm.

I write for a living now. I spend my day crafting sentences that craft realities that tend to people's needs, insecurities and delusions. I come home feeling like I haven't written in ages, and I don't have time to write, most of the time. When I do have time, I don't have RAM. I jingle away to bed, where I sift through the cache and debug. I sleep without realizing it.

I fall asleep on public transport now. I'm still not used to it, growing up with frightful insomnia, sleep comes terrifyingly easy now. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't have to time to figure out how I feel about it.

As I write this, I have an alarm set for 6:30. It is after all the weekend, and my weekends are a race.

Time is silly. So are corporations and contracts. They like you too much so they lock you up and give you free coffee. We sign our lives away to lovelorn stalkers, and they call it modern day labor law. Gone are the days when the only way I knew my writing was good was when they ran off with it. Now I get appreciation, and it is too sweet. I don't understand it. It makes me sick.

There was an explosion this morning in one of the most populated areas in the city. I called my boyfriend to see if he's alive while I made coffee. I logged on to my home-feed to find people rambling about currency. Joking about currency. Quipping about their inability to afford mid-range coffee. I live at a time where all my friends and my friends' parents are dealing in currency. "I managed to get me 200 USD on Tuesday," they socialize. I am struggling to register reality. I drink as much coffee as I can, but on most days, I go for a cup of tea instead. I no longer see the point.

Grandma had lunch with us last week. I cried when I saw her in normal clothes on our couch. Then I grabbed my resolve, stuffed it back into my pants and went back out to talk about mini-sandwiches.

Sunday after work, I went for a walk. I had to pass by the bank to dump my paycheck until they get around to making me a bank account. It had been a while since I walked, time melted and so did my consciousness. I teleported from corner to the next, in a daze. In my head, I was shopping for apartments, down quiet side-streets that were less glamorous and more human than their bamboozled brothers up front. Less than a year ago, I would have been looking up with a smile on my face. That Sunday, however, I was looking up with anxiety. Will the landlord be psychotic? Will the neighbours be crazy? What will I do to my first burglar? How will I get the contractors to listen to me? This street is too dark, is it safe? How will I react to the first time I have a power outage? I am still scared of the dark.

I walked faster. The ATM was busted. Three people talked to me. I didn't welcome it.

I got lost. I sat on the sidewalk, looked around me for any impending danger and checked my phone. I ordered an uber and slipped away into my daze. I didn't snap out of it until Monday night. I had training. It was also Halloween.

Happy dippy day, I crafted sentences that craft realities that tend to people's needs, insecurities and delusions. I now realize my job doubles as reality. Everyone I know is a writer, some are just shittier at it than others. It exhausts me. I wish people would stop sometimes, but they never do. How would they stop if they didn't know they ever started?

How they don't is one of the things that confuse me. If it takes you an average of 20 minutes to see through their facade, how does it take them years? They all need to fire their agents, take a holiday about as long as the eventual breakdown takes, then come back to work in their human skin, bed sores and all.

A couple of days ago, I realized something was wrong. It was also when I realized that survival is all about accepting that life is pointless. I came to that conclusion with the help of a loved one, who was suffering from a lapse of reality that I'd helped with some months earlier. To my surprise, he'd told me what I'd told him, and it helped. In all the rush, I'd forgotten what I'd said, I'd forgotten the sense it made, and got lost trying to find the sense I didn't remember I lost. What a rush.

Life IS pointless. It's wonderfully pointless, so you might as well have fun.

Public transport is still interesting. I have not changed. I still enjoy the stories, I still leave the headphones at home, but now I feel claustrophobic. I hope that next time I won't, and remember that life is a playground. We forget that realities aren't real every now and then, then we remember. The problem isn't in remembering, it's in forgetting.

I am not unhappy. I am not happy. I am not either. The only description to the state I'm in right now is imperfectly described in the first half of the sentence; the only thing I am right now is 'not'. I am not. I'll figure out the rest of the sentence later, and by accepting, the imperfect sentence will no longer bother me.

I have to go now, my time is up. I'm in the middle of a wonderful weekend, and I have to restart enjoying it now. There isn't much time.

The Sandman is Real

I will speak when I can.

I Graduated

I write this as I wait for Sandman to download on a nameless Thursday morning that followed a sleepless Thursday night, but I'm not tired. I'm hugging a gigantic mug of very shitty coffee in the pauses I take between the sentences, for this is something I need to do. This post is homework, more or less, only not as annoying, but just as hard. And it's been long in the making, I've had urges to sit down and write my heart out at times when I had to time-manage pooping and catching the bus, reworking proposals and creative briefs and getting a 2-hour dent in a three-day long workday. It's been an exhausting blur of a semester and I've finally graduated.

I've graduated.

The cap and gown is not until November or October, and the results are not for a couple of weeks still, but the anxiety won't take rain-checks.

How I feel about this hasn't been as clean-cut as Buzzfeed articles sell it out to be. I was breathless and euphoric when I went through my last slide, seeing my ad on big screen was possibly the closest I would ever experience to how a mother feels as she witnesses her child's first tumbly walk. I resolved to stay on campus until I wrap my head around the fact that I won't be coming back there anymore, at least not in the same way, not to attend classes and not to fight endlessly for basic understanding and courtesy. Closure didn't come, and although my lungs registered the fact by successive bursts of audible air, my mind didn't. I was mostly numb, save for fleeting smiles that crossed my face every once in a while, not staying long, not understanding why they were there in the first place, not remembering. It's not as melancholy as it's coming out, perhaps. What I'm trying to say is, throughout the buzz of emotions blurring by and barely making themselves comfortable before they're interrupted by commercial breaks of numbness, the one that kept coming back and overstaying its welcome was anxiety.

I would have thought it would wait a couple of months, or rather that I could make it wait for a couple of months. The effort is like going up against a brick wall with a liberal mindset, trying to talk it out of the impending onslaught of rocks coming its way and its silence making you rethink your rocks in the first place. The wall is winning. The wall doesn't care.

What next?

What now?

I never really learned to sit still you know. I don't know how to take a break, not one without a deadline anyway. How do people rest if naps aren't snatched? How do people have fun if time off isn't a prelude to...time-on?

The realization is too big to register in one go. How does one register that they've graduated? It's abstract.

The small revelations hit me every now and then, as I rummage for stuff in my purse or look for a missing link, as I brush my teeth or find out that I've run out of snacks for the next day, and in my sleep, in nightmares and odd situations that I don't understand for days. Small bites of ideas, like "This vacation ends when you say so" or "How are you gonna live alone if you're still scared of the dark?" or "What if you can't make rent one of those months?" or "What if you're stuck in the same job for ages and can't leave it because rent is on the line?"

Revelations like "How am I gonna pack all those books? Will I have to get rid of my books? How does one hire movers?" or "If I take that job I'll need a car. How will I afford a car?" or "How do people do taxes in here anyway?" or "I'll need to start a bank account to receive my paychecks now." or "It'll be full-time jobs from here on in, what are they like? Will I walk them off or take months to adjust? What happens if I don't adjust?"

Others like "I'll have to learn how to cook, I can't afford to eat out everyday."

And more frightening ones like "What if things go wrong?"

And the scariest of which perhaps are "What if things don't go at all?"

"What if I can't find a job that I like? What if I never end up in my field? What if I can't find a job?"

And the revelation that now it's called "unemployed", not "on summer break."

But what marks it are the things you can't have, because you're old enough to see priorities straight. And the things you can't have because you'll have to save up for and be your own support. Things that will have to wait. Things that you've been waiting for, for years. Things that have kept you going and got you out of bed for four years.

Only few days ago I had my life mapped out, knew what I wanted and had an idea about what I had to do to get there. But I was only a child.

4 days ago, I was only a child.

23 years on this godforsaken planet and the one thing that never failed me is the 4:20 neighborhood songbird. What will I do when the food chain catches up to it?

Hope is doubt, yet people hold faith as the highest cause. All the more proof humanity is subconsciously annihilating itself.

Good work.

Yellow Brick Road Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Schrödinger's Rory

11th of March, 2016

The Neighbourhood Songbird's Duet

Senior Year

The Shadder

Some creatures hunt. Some creatures forage. The Shadder lurk. Sometimes, admittedly, they skulk. But mostly, they just lurk.

The Shadder do not make webs. The world is their web. The Shadder do not dig pits. If you are here you have already fallen.

There are animals that chase you down, run fast as the wind, tirelessly, to sink their fangs into you, to drag you down. The Shadder do not chase. They simply go to the place where you will be, when the chase is over, and they wait for you there, somewhere dark and indeterminate. They find the last place you would look, and abide there, as long as they need to abide, until it becomes the last place that you look and you see them.

You cannot hide from the Shadder. They were there first. You cannot outrun the Shadder. They are waiting at your journey’s end. You cannot fight the Shadder, because they are patient, and they will tarry until the last day of all, the day that the fight has gone out of you, the day that you are done with fighting, the day the last punch has been thrown, the last knife-blow struck, the last cruel word spoken. Then, and only then, will the Shadder come out.

They eat nothing that is not ready to be eaten. Look behind you.

~ Excerpt from Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning.

Orisinal

I want to buy a house, fill it with puppies and beautiful little things like dinosaur tea infusers and cushions knitted with random references and turn it into a home.

Happy New Year