this week’s Thought (singular)
the more i apply my brain the hungrier i become. this seems like something you should figure out about yourself earlier than 23-years-old
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they have a snack handy in their room for any sudden snacking urges. thank you for joining us. may you be able to immediately address your 2am hunger pangs with something crunchy and savoury and easy to eat. i have an apple but i’m ignoring it.
a very warm welcome to old readers as well. may good sense continue to prevail.
hi
august was a tornado in a movie with a bunch of freeze frames that kept zooming in and out. if that makes any sense – little does.
a friend recently spoke about how he would regularly experience the absence of things by sitting in solitude. i hadn’t realised how important it was for me to sit in silence and reconnect with myself every once in a while so i remember that i have a centre i can return to when the running around is paused. nowadays, i find it tough to figure out what to do with my hands when they’re not fiddling with something and what to do with my mind when it’s not thinking of the next task and what to do with my heart when it doesn’t know how to feel about all of this – and i would like to experience the absence of things for a bit. i would like time to talk to myself again.
i have felt tender, like an open, fleshy wound. too open, too raw, too eager to misinterpret everything and turn the words coming my way into knives pointed at me because an open, fleshy wound feels pain or nothing and this pain feeds that pain and the wound is a throbbing, pulsing thing now and i walk around feeling like i have no epidermis and the elements strike my very core just by the virtue of my existence and my thoughts are spiralling spiralling spiralling infinitely and there’s a permanent furrow in the brow of my heart and then i sleep and wake up and feel like a human being for a few hours and it all starts again.
i saw the stars twinkling one night last week and there were so many and they were so bright. i spent a comically long time focussing on taking a picture of a small, yellow flower and the result was so hideously blurred that i had to laugh. i thought about how divinity is in nature, in the clouds about to burst before the evening rains and the tiny sparrow that hops tiny steps inside cavernous buildings. i thought about how i am a tiny sparrow hopping tiny steps inside a cavernous building. i thought about the support of good company and the healing of joy.
i’ve been feeling like the world is going to end about a lot of things recently. some of these things are external – pressures that are a result of circumstance, happenings that are largely out of my control, consequences that seem much larger than they actually are in the grand scheme of things. others are more internal – i feel like i’ve never gotten over anything that has ever happened to me, i don’t know what to do with my sadness. i’m trying to exist in isolation from this pre-apocalyptic feeling. i’m trying to tell myself that everything matters only as much as i let it matter, and that the world cannot end when i am still standing and breathing and thinking and feeling.
i keep reminding myself that sleeping and eating and showering do not come under the realm of wasting time. that being a human being is not a waste of time, and that time spent not being ‘productive’ is not a waste of time. i try to stop writing things like ‘take a shower - 15 mins’ and ‘breakfast - 10 mins’ and ‘talk to amma appa - 10 mins’ on my to-do list. i try to see my life outside of schedules and lists, even when it feels like they are what dictate my life right now.
i have begun to resist the urge to force every aspect of my existence into frameworks and boxes. it is difficult when it feels like all the people and activities around you seem hell-bent on erasing everything about you that doesn’t fit into tight, inflexible structures, but i don’t want to be erased.
i learnt that if you don’t listen to your body, it will scream so loud that you physically cannot ignore it. this feels far worse than ignoring its cries for help in favour of one-less-hour-of-sleep/one-less-meal/one-more-Task-before-a-quick-break.
i have had very grand feelings about friendship. so grand that they silently glow like a small orb, a tiny but mighty steady flame that i will keep tending to. i try to verbalise, try to thank to the extent that i experience, try to communicate these big feelings and this affection and this gratitude in a manner that does them justice, but it always seems like too little. i trust my friends are aware, and i hope with all my heart that i can carry this honour and privilege of knowing such lovely people with the fierce care and protection it deserves.
ps: happy september :D
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English Recitation Competition
Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot
All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
Habitable Nebula, Timothy Donnelly
I still can’t say what life is for, but it can’t be to pretend that every part of it is knowable, or that what appears to be to the naked eye or in the middle ground or documented on paper approximates a person any better than a daisy does our sun. When at a loss for what I am, I know I must be feeling it deep in the layers, where a turbulence gives rise to clouds so massive they collapse in a bliss of gravity, condensing into this music I can daisy into morning as it daisies me into morning.
Peridot, Richard Scott
O for a few more of those pre-trauma days, when life was as dazzling as a piece of raw peridot and all my hours were grass stains and beach glass and sycamore leaves glinting and shifting and iris spears shooting up, up, up! And lime cordial, molten peridot, thick and gloopy as time in the bottom of a glass—sliding, coating. And a fresh bruise when a bruise was just a bruise and could fade. And the gloaming when even the gloaming was green—pear-green and freckled sky, mustachioed wisps. But he is here too—fission-green flaw deep within the facet—giving off his own glow, blinding, disorientating. A crystal kind of man, polymorph, because he still has something to teach me and I don’t know if I will ever truly learn it. Protective stone, keeper-away of evil spirits, where were you when I needed you? His touch was mantle-hot and ruinous; intrusive, extrusive. I am always looking for a new frequency—hoping to recover some peridot shard of myself in this lapidary of broken things—but I can only translate what is already here and not transform. Hats off to the crystallographer who is watching chartreuse ions precipitate into livid rocks, I am toxic—petrified ectoplasm—luminously bonded to my past.
The Good Side of the Internet
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this week’s Song
Little Lion Man by Mumford & Sons
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
Fiddling with my hair as I am reading this. The prologue is so real. Nice writing style