time travel - part three

i am so grateful for work but practicality of the marketplace is slowly stripping my ability to feel, to write and to introspect. here's to not losing that facet of me that had loved to feel deeply and write freely:

read part one and part two

part three focuses on the year 2016. i am so lucky to have found someone i cherish so deeply now and for the past two and a half+ years, a man whom i am seriously considering to spend the rest of my life with. most of the time i forget how i was like before i got this lucky. year 2016 was the year i experimented the most with personal growth i.e. growth in different trajectories and the constant pushing of boundaries to see where i would break. and break i did. by the end of the year i was so barren that i called it quits and told jesus i needed to re-pivot back to the one Thing that matters most. it was then that i started to get lucky. but i am who i am today bc of all these collective experiences - heartbreaks, chopping off my long hair for the first time in years for a fresh start, feeling like i wasn't good enough and pent-up anger that spat at the world for making me feel that way when i knew my worth. it was through these experiences that i got to re-validate my self-worth again and again, and do justice to investing in myself.

part three: 

take me somewhere nice - mogwai 


[2016]


wrapped in my college jumper like a dumpling but it still felt like the dead of winter. the sound of fingers gently striking keyboards like the pattering of rain drops, breaking the otherwise oppressive silence of an unusually quiet library past nine. it was a chilly night. a night walk to starbucks and butterflies in my stomach - here it was again, this familiar feeling of a nascent something that eventually turned out to be a false alarm. silly me, but of course i wouldn't have known that. the dull ache of loneliness juxtaposed against the warmth of a boy's company. a takeaway paper cup worth seven bucks nestled in my cupped hands, fingers stretched out and parched of warmth in the chilliness of an enclosed performance hall with the ac turned on to full blast. the windows and doors were frosted from the cold. it was empty, save for us. a safe place to mutually trade stories of how prior things ended. a note of finality - yes i was done and i was proud of myself for moving on
(or so i thought). drunk on exuberance from a vulnerable conversation. a brownie bar for me from the convenience store. finally i'm not an afterthought, but someone worth remembering in the little things. maybe this was it. (it wasn't). silly me.


yes i'm changing - tame impala 


[2016]


"the circle is full and now it's closed". there was so much anger, but the suicide of a cherished member of the community completely threw things into perspective - it made me realise the way we trivalised death and held on to our petty pride at the expense of things we did that we might have regretted at a later stage. a reconciliation followed by an indefinite truce - i was no longer going to be angry, and so we became friends again. there was still alot of comfort in an old friendship that went in a special direction, ended, mended, soured and then got mended again. the lines might have appeared to have blurred again - that celebratory night after four consecutive shots (inebriated but i do remember), but no i'd changed by then - it was zhuangzi-rsque of me to have separated the physical from the emotional. inside i was hollow and felt nothing anymore. yes i'm changing, yes i'm gone. yes i'm older, yes i'm moving on. 


one dance - drake, wizkid, kyla


[2016]


this song was the song to top the charts in the usa when i was alone in new york city. my iphone wallpaper read "twenty is prime" - somewhere in the recesses of my soul i wanted to shout out to the world: LOOK AT ME! A SMALL GIRL IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OF. "i feel so alive, so alive so alive!" my heart drumming in my chest as i took the metro from my workplace in franklin avenue, going above the brooklyn bridge back to halsey street back "home". even then i knew i would miss the sun setting in between two mammoth-like buildings, the warmth of a pinkish-orange hue still imprinted in my memory, so vividly.