time travel - part four (on pseudo love)

read part one, part two and/or part three here

21 june 2016: my thoughts centring a conversation with my gym buddy in new york, i wrote:

'the residue from a conversation last evening - the nature of a thought festering at the back of your head that had hitherto been only privy to you changes form when it manifests from your own mouth and you surprise yourself, surprise yourself at how weird it sounds when vocalised - "i realised i cannot truly say i have loved someone before - no, not in that sense" "oh...isn't that kind of...sad?" "i guess i just haven't found someone i would go that deep for" - to not have truly loved or felt truly loved at twenty - that hit me. fondness had always smouldered away - was always soldered thin under the solder of an overarching reason or inopportune timing, but whatever it was the glue had always been built on tenuous bricks of compromise anyway. maybe this is why memories have a stranglehold over me. for a girl who pursues absolute clarity i think i scare people away most of the time.'

8 feb 2020: wrt. to the defining moments in my life (defining being a moment impactful enough for it to have informed and altered subsequent trajectories of the paths i've taken), i wrote:

'at 21, you will finally believe in love".

truth be told, until then i was convinced i would eventually end up being together with someone i would try hard to love for the rest of my life, a response to being moved into entering and committing to a relationship for the sake of company and stability. till then, there was no one i could truly connect with, no one who could mutually reciprocate my feelings to equal lengths. i dreamt of a puppy love in junior college, which was my first formal exposure to boys post-puberty, but that yearning merely manifested into romanticised ideals that i eventually had to bury. i perceived the inability to attract who i wanted as a personal defect, thinking to myself that there was perhaps something wrong with me that turned people i desired away from me. this is my ode to remembering those moments of vulnerability and dull heartache - before the tables turned, before i learned that it is somehow fortuitously possible to find that favourite person who finds you to be his/her favourite person too.

falling in love at a coffee shop - landon pigg



[2013]

this was how i'd imagined i'll meet my soulmate. nestled against a sturdy pillar in my favourite quiet spot in rj: a book on hand, this tune on repeat, i'd dream with my head in the clouds of this abstract concept everyone seemed to be acquainted with in one way or another except me: love.

this also reminds me of my jc fantasy: i dreamt i would meet my soulmate while browsing through shelves housing contemporary literature in the rj library. in the first scene, he would be picking out books on the opposite side of the shelf before our eyes would lock for a long second. it would be love at first sight. in the second scene, he would come over and we would be browsing books from the same shelf. in a kdrama-rique fashion, we would reach out at the same instance to pick out our favourite book respectively - the same book. the rest would be history. this is called a fantasy for an obvious reason.


still into you - paramore 



[2013-2014]

internal monologues, in a time past where i lived in my head a little too much:

26 july 2013: 'i know this is wrong & i should not even be thinking about this but let's be friends?"

16 feb 2014: an internal catharsis - ankles deep in the sea, i set my ideals alight.
"delete, delete, d e l e t e". it was valentine's day that i set aflame my unrequited yearning for a boy with dreamy eyes.

27 june 2014: 'but i keep slipping back bc this pull feels like the gravitation of the full moon - i am the hapless sea that cannot hold itself together, the currents which cannot exert control over themselves - currents which crash against the shore but roll back into their own muck & subsequently carry themselves out to sea again'. i had fallen in too deeply in love with my ideals about love. i could no longer differentiate yearning for love versus yearning for a specific person, instead only knowing how to project my ideals onto a singular person.

sink - qrion



[2015]

this reminds me of freshman year in college. drizzly saturday mornings doing laundry. solitary, melancholic walks where i disconnected and plugged into my own world, wondering if i'd ever have the opportunity to share this richness with anyone else.

18 aug 2015: looking down from my window on the sixth floor, staring intently at the back of my freshman orientation eye candy engaged in a deep conversation with someone else. it was the beginning of a difficult transition phase - the first time moving away from home and into a campus for the next four years, about to reach my threshold for superficial conversations with acquaintances i couldn't care less. and so i wrote: "(i) have this burning desire to walk around the campus at night & dive into a really deep conversation with someone". but really, it was me projecting my acute loneliness from immersing myself in a new environment, onto a face that had seemed palatable amidst the whirlwind of flux.

30 nov 2015: i wrote, 'morning, 6th: i will be there if you ask me to.' until then, it was the closest i had been to experiencing the tip of the iceberg called heartache. i knew i still couldn't call that love, but my feelings had been genuine and pure. i'd also thought an airport send-off constituted closure, a closure that'd been good enough for me. this tune reminds me of this process of head vs. heart, anger vs. sadness, natural goodwill vs. the concerted hardening of heart.

this is what you came for - calvin harris 



[2016]

"and everybody's watching her / but she's looking at you" this was the song playing in the club on a friday night out. the club where i had waited all night to dance with a particular someone. it was the wee hours of the morning and i found myself looking at said person standing in front of me, but he felt like a complete stranger, a different person from who i thought i knew - the person whom i recall made me feel like i was finally more than an afterthought (the evidence? bc he bought me a brownie bar from cheers during his trip to the convenience store with his friends). although i was slightly inebriated, i still remember how i kept searching for his eyes, but he just would not look at me, nor make any effort to dance with me. meanwhile, i noticed from the corner of my eye, boys on the peripheries trying their best to inch closer to me with their ridiculous dance moves. i paid no heed to them. i only had my eyes fixated on this person, but through and through our eyes never locked. i don't remember much of what happened next except for how i had felt then: small, ashamed and extremely confused. i knew i was worth more than all of these, but all i could do then was to throw a closet self-pity party for myself and smile on the outside.



[2016]

6 may 2016: 'i looked up to the ceiling, felt myself effacing into the crowd like smoke dispersing itself on its upward trajectory, half-inebriated, the synergy of bodies chafing against one another to the beat that was drumming so loudly it hurt my ears yet felt so alive in my body it was moving me, arms strewn up, was i imaginary? body to body, packed like sardines - if this were the mrt i would have hated my lot but this was the place where people lost themselves to the collective effervescence of a crowd, lost themselves to their loneliness, lost themselves to insobriety (& impropriety), who are you but it's fine bc i am lonely & in need of company, so this is what it feels like to have somebody to hold - '

"so lost, i'm faded"

i told myself i would dance for my own perceived beauty and self-worth, but the reality was that i had let myself go.

~ to be continued ~

trying to make sense of a reality i still find hard to grasp

out of the blue
they made us part ways and say goodbye.
but how? how do i say goodbye
to faces i've been so accustomed to seeing around?
and how? how do i say goodbye,
knowing that i got to keep afloat -
even when i'd been learning the ropes
from them, from those whose expertise had been
valued, admired and sought,
but not rewarded by the one
whose opinion would have mattered
the most.
instead - tenure abruptly cut short.
gifted nothing but the short end of the stick
for all the late nights poured into oiling slick,
the machinery of this revenue generating machine.
the collective injustice of it all.
when we see ourselves as people,
but they see us as revenue and cost, profit and loss.
numbers to balance on the balance sheet,
meant for the perusal of shareholders, of which
we are all still complicit.

so many faces i'll miss dearly -
they've helped me shaped my first worldview
of how kind "cut-throat" corporate life can be.
they've showed me my growth matters,
my opinion still matters, even if i'm lacking
by virtue of being young.
how even the slight alignment of words on a slide
should be taken seriously, or risk ramifications
of putting my professionalism and work ethic under suspicion.
not forgetting the jokes and animated stories:
they remind me of friendship in a nutshell,
in a place where elsewhere, would have been a foreign concept.

shock has given away to dull sadness, and perhaps numbness.
i really wish we could all stay. i really do.
but i also realise life is an adventure.
we are all carrying luggages headed in different directions,
towards different destinations, with different timelines -
but we were lucky enough to meet for a stopover,
in an airport that had been kind to us
until our next flight out.