24 June 2022

And here I am, on the train, head too muddled by conversation and new information to open my laptop to code (as I should be on the MRT since I made the excuse to travel to, when in reality I just love travel time as an excuse to ponder), gobsmacked and overwhelmed in the best way possible, about how life turns its head upon itself, doubling down and over, backflips, then gets back up, doubling everything you had from before.

I haven't been writing much, haven't been thinking much, haven't been feeling much. There's still too much from this past half of a year to properly unpack and unravel. I still don't understand the things I’ve done in my reality, and fail to synchronise them with my internal dissonances. I live simultaneously in the past and future, and I sit within the liminal grey shadow between the dichotomies, on autopilot, sauntering forward.

I function in the days, frankly still jaded by a rejection that I still have to tell every new person I meet about to convince myself I'm over.

I am a sundial telling of times while standing still; reduced to a shadow of myself, implying the existence of a time of light.

I am a chronic planner jaded over over-planning; I am a cynical hopeful who sits around and prays for pathways to open again. I love the prospect of future possibilities while hating every prospect of failure in its peripheries. I say I find post-graduation plans pointless because I scripted 6 years of my life to do improv.

And here I am. Living the most freely I ever have. Loving. Hurting. Breaking. Building. Breathing — taking it all in to throw it all up in the spare plastic bag I keep for a nauseous mishap.

Because at the end of the day it all feels so temporary –– and all these places and people like origami –– so beautifully manipulated by my perception in our encounters, and yet, still perpetually paper. Paper that will crinkle and wilt upon rain, paper that will tear when I do.

So this is my Pompeii pushing 20, succumbing to landslides, overhaul, erosion, or gradual weathering from natural disasters and climate change. Here I am, acclimatising, blind in the eye of the storm, subject to tectonic paradigm shifts, my feet on nothing but faith in physics. In the cyclical vortex, I am untouchable to everything but my own internal turmoil.