How Can it be? I still Believe Something is Out There

Instead of sleeping:

I braid my hair. I file my nails. I try to edit a story I have been working on. I start working on another story. I think about doing research for work. I look at the night sky to see if I can see the moon from my bedroom window. I check if there is light in neighbouring apartment windows. I update my Goodreads 'currently reading'. I stand on the toilet seat to look at moving traffic. I switch on the light to admire my book shelf. I read one short story in a collection of short stories. I read an essay online. I read a book. I go check if I locked the front door. I start texting a friend and then remember it is 2:30 am so I stop myself. I practice how to conjugate words in German. I go to pee. I remember it's been about an hour before I had a cup of tea. I make one. I drink the tea while I listen to music. I Google Courtney Barnett. I read a poem. I think about what the poet was going through while writing the poem. I log in to tumblr.  I wonder if I should eat breakfast at 3:00 am. And then I can't keep my eyes open.

The title of this post is from the song Staying Up by The Neighbourhood.

I Will Take a Whisper If That's All You Had to Give

Are we still friends, you and I?

I think about all the friends I have lost to time and distance and responsibilities and I hope to God that time and distance and responsibilities will never be cruel to us, would have never been cruel to us. It is bad enough, as it is,  that we are no longer inhabiting the same world. Yesterday I passed by that school your niece and nephew (used to) go to and it occurred to me that I haven't seen them and your brother-in-law in a very long while. They don't know me, but I once saw them with your sister and that was when I made the connection. I couldn't say hi, I was quite a distance from them and I also didn't want to bring up memories,  but ever since then, I was drawn to them, your niece especially. So yesterday I thought about the reasons why I haven't seen them. It could be that it's because my morning routine has changed.

"This is how I lose people," I told myself as I walked my way through my day, "I forget to keep in touch with them, they forget to keep in touch with me and somewhere in the midst of not keeping in touch, life happens." But this loss feels particularly painful because, somehow in my own warped way, they were my connection to you. And that bond that I had created between them and myself, that bond that only I could see is getting weaker with everyday that passes without my seeing them. That is what time takes from us. I was reading a blog the other day about the various things that time takes from us and the writer had an elaborate list of all the things she had lost to time. Time took grief away from me. And I was glad because it was unbearable but at the same time I resented the fact that I could go whole days without thinking about you. Now I see glimpses of you in everyday things. Like I think about you when I tie a scarf around my hair (this is almost everyday). Or how sometimes when I have to wake up and switch on the lights because there is a sentence that I have to write down otherwise I will forget it. It's become a habit. I make sense of my world through words. I think about you in those instances. What would you be obsessed with? What are you obsessed with? Time, the passage of it, has always been an interesting concept. It is interesting to think how it has been eleven years, eleven fucking years and time hasn't stopped, won't stop. I am probably naive in thinking that eleven years wouldn't have changed us. Because eleven years have changed me in ways I never imagined eleven years capable of. Eleven years would have definitely changed you.

So, are we still friends?

The title of this post is from the song Echo by Jason Walker.

There is More Than One Answer to These Questions

On the eve of what was to be our date, this guy I was supposed to go out with called to ask where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do. He said that he had been thinking of creative ways that would make me happy and maybe he wasn't as creative as he thought he was because, as a last resort, he decided to ask me. Before I even answered, he justified his question by telling me that I read far too many books such that anything he came up with, I had already read about. He said that I am a difficult person to date, that I am a difficult person to love.
Spoiler alert: I didn't go out with him. And I stopped dating his kind.

I don't know why I remembered that incident. But I was readying myself for the day this morning when, for one fleeting second, I felt as if I couldn't recognise the person looking back at me on the mirror. This feeling passed as quickly as it came but it left a strange aftertaste in form of unanswered questions; like how does it feel to meet me? How does it feel to sit opposite me in a coffee shop and wait for my input in a conversation? Most importantly, how does it feel to be loved by me?

The title of this post is from the song Closer to Fine by Indigo Girls.

Get into my Ear: Trapdoor by Twenty One Pilots

I am currently reading three books: The Unknown Errors of our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews;  and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. This last book, which is a memoir of moods and madness has inspired me to make a playlist of terribly depressing songs to go with it. So far, the playlist has 44 songs lasting about 3 hours. The dominant artists in this playlist are Blue October and Twenty One Pilots. If you are familiar with their music, you know that this combination is lethal and is the saddest you'll ever get (other than Gary Jules in Mad World where he says "I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad that dreams in which I am dying are the best I have ever had").

I find myself going back to Trapdoor every now and again. I don't know if I have already gushed about my love for Twenty One Pilots before. But I discovered them last year and what followed was me looking for everything they have ever done (including breathing). I am not depressed, and that's probably why it is hard for me to admit that this song touches something in my core. It makes me love life, and appreciate every life that is out there like the wasp that somehow got in the house this morning and it felt like it was following me around (totally random, I know).

Favourite Lyrics

Nobody knows his real name
But now he just uses one he saw on a grave

He thinks that faith might be dead
Nothing kills man faster than his own head
He used to see dreams at night
But now he is just watching the backs of his eyes

He pretends he is okay
But you should see
Him in bed late at night
He is petrified
Take me out, finish this waste of a life

Trapdoor- Twenty One Pilots

Dear 2015,

I am ashamed to say that I am not quite ready to let you go just yet. This, you must know after spending every minute of your time with me. I can confidently say that you know me intimately, the way no other person does. So you surely know that I never have a problem with letting go. But you, 2015, are proving difficult to let go. We are 14 days in to 2016, exactly two weeks since I said goodbye to you, and I should have let go. But you have a way of sneaking and creeping your way back into my mind and just when I least expect it, you show yourself. See, yesterday while I was going through my day, trying to get acquainted with 2016, which by now you must know is your replacement, I might have hurt my right forearm. I don't know how this happened, 2015. What I know is that I was in class and when I took my pen to jot something down in my notebook, I felt this pain, it wasn't a sharp pain nor was it the wonderful ache of having pulled a previously unused muscle. No, this was a dull throbbing ache. It was continuous that it made me aware of how I was using my right hand. Like how my fingers flew across my phone while typing a text, or how I gripped my toothbrush just before bed or how I had to use my left hand to hold my Kindle while reading in bed. And so in my journal entry, I tried to remember where and when I could have hit my arm, because surely, in the midst of the mundaneness that made my day, I must have. Could it be in the morning while I was taking a shower? Making my coffee? Lifting my bag full of books? Walking? During my commute and changing of busses? Needless to say, I couldn't figure it out. And this brought me to the sudden realisation that I need to be present. I need to be able to let you go and be aware of my ordinary everyday existence, because otherwise, I will kill my ability to be always present. And you know that I like being present.

But 2015, I don't know what it is about you that makes it hard to let go. Other than my graduation in December and that time I had a near death experience in October, nothing about you stands out in my mind. I have to think really hard to come up with the memories that you and I shared. That you and I made. And yet the calender in my bedroom stopped at September. I stopped turning the page with every new month after that as if turning the pages would prevent time from going on. In October, you might recall that my red watch stopped working. And in what I can only call a mysterious turn of events, just before your inevitable ending, 2015, my brown leather watch stopped at 10 minutes to two. If were a superstitious person -which both of us know I am not (I called myself level headed, sometime in our relationship and you seemed to agree) I could have said that this was a sign. But alas, all things must end, despite you prolonging our eventual parting by introducing me to the Strokes' The End has no End which I loved and still do.

But 2015, this clinging to each other is not healthy. Perhaps in my own warped way I thought that by my clinging to you, you could redeem yourself, just like you did at the beginning when I told you that I didn't like odd numbers and you told me you were special because you were smack in the middle of the decade. That somehow I could remember something exceptionally spectacular that you did in the future. You perfomed poorly, 2015. And, despite us having quiet late date nights reading and drinking tea-infused vodka (I'll remember those nights with fondness, even when I am already doing the same with 2016) you and I must part. So, to quote The Indigo Girls, "Time has made history of us." This, 2015, is goodbye. Here's to a future nodding acquaintanceship

Yours, with love,
Lina

You Must Rely on Love Once in a While to Give you Reason

Black coffee first thing in the morning. Cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso. Diet Coke. Vintage coffee mugs. Fancy tea. Peeing. The illusion of a flat stomach after pooping. Pooping. Long cold showers. Scented lotion. Perfumes. Nail polish. Natural hair. Washing my hair. Scented candles. Old books. Bookshelves. Short stories. Notebooks. My Kindle Paperwhite.  Reading poems in the middle of the night. Women writers. Prose. Susan Sontag. bell hooks. Sad music. Discovering new music artists. Looking at the sky at night. New moon. The sun between 7 and 10 in the morning. Long walks in the morning sun. The breeze from the open kitchen window. Walking in the rain. Making my own breakfast. Eating said breakfast. Freshly squeezed orange juice. All types of salads. Sandwiches. Vegan dishes. Omelette. Tattoos. Button down shirts. Vintage leather satchels. Yoga. Single people. Morning people. Other people's morning routines. Lone lights from apartment windows late at night. The distant sound of traffic in  the wee hours of the night. Taillights of moving vehicles at night. Unmade beds. Clean sheets. Studio apartments. Houseplants. The aftertaste of cigarettes. Chugging vodka from the bottle. The sweet burn of vodka down my throat. Skulls. Owls. Fresh flowers. Dark skinned women. Brightly coloured shoes. Jeans that fit like a dream.

These are a few things that make me happy.

The title of this post is from the song Shock to Your System by Tegan and Sara.

Sundays' 3 O'clock

There is a certain unexplainable calmness that Sundays' 3 o'clock bring with them. It is the silence that I realise has been there for quite some time after the faithful church goers who congregate at the church behind my bedroom have gone home. It is the sound of music softly playing because, somehow, Sundays always seem so dismal and therefore call for soft music, if at all. It is realising, quite suddenly, that my eyes are glazing over whatever reading material that I have after a morning of cup after cup of coffee and reading. It is in reveling in the nostalgia of Sundays past and (sort of evaluation(?) of how far I've come) wondering if my former self on one of those past Sundays at 3 O'clock ever imagined that this is how I would be spending my Sunday. It is in indulging in heavy daydreams of all the places I want to visit, of all the things I want to do while there. It is in realising that there are no guarantees in ever satisfying my wanderlust even after visiting these places, as past experience has been kind enough to point out. It is in acknowledging this fact but at the same time giving my mind free reign to wander, to explore and to dream. It is at 3 O'clock on Sundays that I reconcile with this incomprehensible fact that I'll never be content, that no matter how many items I cross from my bucket list, I may never achieve that elusive zen, that I will always be seeking something, that I may never have it all. And that, surprisingly, is okay.

Oh, but how I love 3 O'clock on Sunday!