reticence

   .

what made me feel incandescently happy & invincible throughout the night 

1.the fault in our stars (troye sivan) 

2. soldier on (the temper trap)

3. box of stones (benjamin francis leftwich)

4. calender girl (stars)

5. this place is a shelter (olafur arnalds) 

6. falling in love at a coffee shop (landon pigg)

7. 3 rounds & a sound (blind pilot) 

8. holly home rd (brolly)

9. vultures (folly & the hunter) 

10. rabbit heart (florence & the machine)

11. there is a light that never goes out (the smiths)

12. stop this train (john mayer) 

13. belong (cary brothers) 

14. the suite (downton abbey)

15. what it is (kodaline)

16. a pound of flesh (radical face)

17. medicine (daughter) 

18. dead hearts (stars) 

19. what the water gave me (florence & the machine) 

20. hold still (sleeping at last) 

beginning of an end

i don't know how to put this into words because even though words are beautiful, reticence can supersede in the absence of words

for once this really feels highly personal & i am not going to dwelve into the specifics because i don't think i've felt this way before in a long time: when everything is so apt and the heart feels so much conviction of the Savior's love, but at the same time, the soul feels so stoic and the magnitude of the revelation is not being translated into the orthodox intangible, ineffable wave of emotions 

to sum it up, i got prayed for by a leader i'd never seen before after answering the call (which even though i was afraid, i felt so compelled to answer), & he prayed over three aspects of my life that i'd been struggling with for the past few weeks 

& even though my soul still feels stagnated, i know that something has been stirred, and this is just the start to the end of struggling,

because "it is finished". 

late night decision

i will not, not because i can't, but because "anomalousness" is priced far above anything else, & i have decided that i will not compromise my stature as "denise" to gratify my ideals- i will not risk cheapening myself, i will not reduce my worth to be merely a name on a list. i do not want to become merely "another" person, as if i am a repetition of someone else.

i am neither needy nor desperate, and something in me feels compelled to shout that to the world, to ears merely closed off to what they wish to hear. i am merely a victim of ideas. even now, part of me screams that i am over-thinking and over-reacting, that it is nice to be vulnerable in such a way, that to be vulnerable is to be beautiful. but no, not in this way, not when you strip the only protective layer of "fun" to discover that what's left is merely to be classified, like a common specimen that cannot stand alone but must belong to a bigger group. 

no, i want people to remember me as the girl who is always different. i want people to be able to say, "oh, that denise? well she's not like the rest". i want the boy from the future who is going to form my future to be able to love these parts of me without trying, and i am determined not to settle for anything less. 

the heart and brain being two different organs are difficult to reconcile, but i hope they will do so soon. 

thankfulness

the past two days have been incredibly blessed

didn't get glorious grades that made me happy or proud to talk about them (& was extremely disappointed with my favourite subject) 

 

but in return i've learnt thankfulness (which doesn't translate into complacent contentedness with where i am), i've experienced the warmth of friendship, His faithfulness which accompanies deliverance & the nerve-wrecking wait in faith, anchored in the knowledge that His plans are & will be good 

finally found out i made the cut, and this means so much to me

couldn't have made it if You didn't will me to, all glory to You 

"pick me up"

"vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. it is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves" (pg 58) 

vertigo: "an insuperable longing to fall" 

vs

"You are my lamp, o lord; the lord turns my darkness into light" 

2 samuel 22:29 

sermon made me extremely sad today when it struck me that contrary to what i have been feeding myself, maybe i have not even experienced my first love with jesus

it made my soul retract into the bottomless cavern in my heart when i contemplated a plausible response to martyr death (the question that had been occupying a compartment of my brain entitled "i choose not to answer" ever since i read "everything is illuminated" by j.s.f, and resurfaced again today): i still chose not to answer, because i was afraid to admit (if faced with such extremes), that i would choose to live at the expense of my soul 

it made my heart sink because all this while, "soul" has been an esteemed leader, but i realised i would rather betray "soul" for body, spiritual death for the shell of life

throughout the service the word "cowardice" kept sneering at me, and it was only today i realised how afraid i am of putting myself in a truly vulnerable position; like an exposed snail without a shell. it disappointed me, me who was genuinely captivated by the beauty of vulnerability

all these conceptions are mere ideas

bring me to a place of first Love lord:

what i want is not answers to all these questions that only serve to test my faith 

what i truly want is an encounter that will bring me to a place of illumination, a place of unmitigated,divine Love 

i don't want to live in a world of ideas anymore: they are nothing but shams  

(mountains high or valley low, i'll sing out & remind my soul: "i am Yours, i am forever Yours") 

what is ugliness?

today i saw ugliness:

it wasn't blatant like a crude stub remaining of an amputated toe on display
it wasn't a melancholic kind of ugliness that was so vulnerable, it became beautiful

it was an ugliness bearing the semblance of (something like) conditional tokenism:
today i realised "nice-ness" (if there is even such a word) & "genuineness" are not interchangeable terms,
hardly anyone was crawling into anyone's skin,
people seemed to understand but all they did was to justify with that system of "conditional tokenism", attempting to think from a person's point of view not because it was just but because it could alleviate one's disintegrating state of morality, because they could say that they had indeed made a fair assessment of the situation and emerged victorious with their view

it was a carnival named "the vanity of words"
words were thrown around loosely like the discs meant to topple a pyramid of cans
what was the prize?

today i also learnt that defending has absolutely nothing to do with arbitrary preferences: it is borne out an instigated desire to stand in the camp for the weak, when the weak has been stripped of a mouthpiece and cannot speak, a response to the strong's negation of the weak


learning these things didn't make me agitated nor angry
it just made me sad because we are all like slaves to our inherent vices.
what's worse?
choosing to comment and to put myself  as an onlooker on a pedestal, as if i myself am a saint, makes me part of the ugliness too

but i will do so anyway
just to get this out of my system
 

beyond the "thingness" of things

a list of things that make today, today:

burden no. 2 i.e. project work consultation (from four reduced to one, but still it went surprisingly well), lunch with y & a few classmates which was quite lovely (despite-), sourcing for a new placid reading spot in school, & finding it with rapture, relished reading at the new quiet reading spot & watching occasional people pass by while believing that they could not see me because i didn't want to be seen (not because i was abashed but because i was content to efface into the same walls that i was leaning on), listened to the smiths & sang along to/with myself, took breaks from my book by glancing at the unobstructed sky (& soaking in its blissfulness), more reading & feeling (fiction built on the holocaust is terrifyingly enthralling, yet really terrifying- faced with the same circumstances, would you question the existence of god? would you accuse your friend to save your family's skins? would you choose to give yourself up into diabolical hands as an act of sacrificial love to your friend in need, if you lived only for yourself & had no family? would you snatch the gun out of the general's hands, only to plant it to your own head because you wanted to be in control of your own fate, even when you were already hovering at death's doorstep? // "i am a good person who has lived in a bad time" //), cca meeting with batchies to consolidate & make the best out of the remnants of the cca's fate, danced for a while & felt innately beautiful again despite occasional forgetfulness, penned a letter to an anonymous stranger who is a deserving recipient of love despite what the world will ever tell him/her, read some more & finished the book with tears that were a product of a harrowing ending that was imperfectly perfect

(sometimes i find myself being so pretentious to myself- is my creation of self the product of an idea of an ideal self???)

"so she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love- loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. love itself became the object of her love. she loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. it was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair" 

"they reciprocated the great and saving lie- that our love for things is greater than our love for our love of things- wilfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, wilfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life" (pg 80, 83, everything is illuminated, j.s.f)