jaitort

There are things you keep thinking would go away until the moment comes when they take you by surprise, and you give in. Standing at the trains station, she brought it up again. She brought her up again. I wanted to end the conversation, or I wanted to keep the topic. I didn't know. I don't know which it was. The mentioning of her name brought it all back, her voice, her smile, her way of calling my name...I cannot get rid of it, can I? I concluded in firmly by declaring that I would never go out of my way to expect anything more than the sweet memory I had, but in my head, I was floating away to that faraway land where she left for. I told her about a fabulous woman who came in the other say, whose beauty had the power to erase my infatuation for a moment. But only for a moment. I talked about my intention to ask out a very special girl, but I knew all I was about to do is to distract myself from her. I cannot forget her, can I? they say admitting your problem is the first step to overcome it. I should probably stop repressing my feeling, but I am confused, because I've talked about it with all those with whom I could share. I have already let it out, so how can I reveal more about it? There was a time I believed that the fire is so strong that one day the fuel would burn out, but it hasn't. I ran away to get over it, and when I came back I felt the city was empty without her, but I was wrong. The city is never empty. Now, after she is gone, she becomes omnipresent. No amount of looking back or forward can efface her imprint on my mind. No amount of your boss or his girlfriend flirting with you helps either. They only make things worse. They only remind you how much you miss someone else. You are not flattered by their attention, which only makes you angrier for not being able to reach out to the one that has trapped your heart. Reaching out to someone, it seems to have always been what I have been trying to do but failed, ever since I was a teenager. I'm always choosing the impossible ones. I start to wonder whether I enjoy self-tormenting. I always turn away from the ones I like, run away from the ones I care and hide away from the ones I want. Much I can figure out except this kind of behavior of mine. And I wonder if I still have enough time to get things clear this time.

hitandrun

How many ways are there to remember? I'm not sure whether the word remember is better called a voluntary verb or involuntary. But whether voluntary, when you mean making sure to engrave something into your stock of memory, or involuntary, when you mean the trace of the past left with you becoming part of you whether you like or not. Often, that something appears to us in the form of a story with narration or a static scene, I think. There are characters, landscapes, dialogues, and then certain feelings are recalled, which are often merely by the names because the passage of time generate the distance distorting them. There may be a frequent pattern of telling a past story: "My best friend moved away with her parents. I was so sad", "our team won the first place. I was so proud", "they pushed me to speak in front of the whole group of people. I was so nervous", "she killed herself. I was so confused",etc. I tend to "remember" the facts and then the feeling, the labelled feeling, and I've said to myself that perhaps this is the way I was supposed to remember. However, recently I've discovered that the past did not come to me only like that, under my control. Yes, I thought "remember" is doing inventory, sorting out items, and even with the unwanted articles, one can always shelf, arrange and count them to have a clear idea about what, where and how many, but there is a different kind of bringing back the past I did not realize, which is not monitored. It will hit you unexpectedly. One moment I am totally absorbed in a novel, or exhausted from the job which I cannot wait to finish and go home, or taking a walk with friends in the sun, talking and laughing, the next minute, it attacks me, giving me a chill running from the head to the toes. The flash, but the cold flash, getting my brain burned and my stomach twisted. At a moment I feel whatever the substance that makes my is melt and sucked out of me, my knees weak, my back going into a spasm, feeling nauseated and as if I'd fall over, which is nevertheless a feeling, and I never actually fall. In fact, it is rather a combined sensation than feeling. The triggers are various, a sound, a word, or sometimes it just jumps in without any obvious hints from the outside. I may be confused about sets off the alarm but whenever I get this sensation, I know why, that is when I remember. A memory I cannot call good or bad, or even want to call it memory. It is something too intense, having tested my potential capacity to feel as a human being, but too intense means demanding too much energy, which cannot last long. It may have more positive influence than negative to me overall but being reminded of that is still too much to take, ending draining my energy and messing up with my mind, so I have learned to stop it at the gateway. I do not intentionally bring that chapter of my life, so sometimes I forget I remember it, and it is until that fainting sensation hits me that I know how strong it is and how remembering can be uncontrollable.

Myopia

Yes, I'm near-sighted, and yes, I need some artificial objects to correct my vision, but I hate glasses. Before one summer I had had the perfect sight and after that summer faraway things became blurry. Which summer, I don't remember, perhaps when I was 12 or 13. But I do remember that reading books did not ruin my sight, which would later cause other less obvious damages. I've always hated glasses, not because how it changed the way I looked but because of the fact that it changed. I feel being forced to add something that does not belong to my body and constantly aware of the frames, metal or plastic, around my eyes, which bothered me. When I was in high school, I only wore them when having classes because I was never able to walk, run or climb stairs wearing glasses. In fact I was not able to do anything involving physically moving much. I did a test once in the basketball court shooting basketballs, results being in the exact same distance, when seeing clearly in glasses I scored zero, but when facing the blurry board without my glasses and only sensing the aim, I was almost as good as before. So, since I normally sat on the first or second row in classes and seldom turned back, until my graduation, some of my classmates still did not know that I wore glasses. Since I could not get my good vision back, I was desperate to get rid of the glasses, and before long, I turned to the contacts, since when at least I have been able to pretend that I am still the little kid who could see perfectly. 

As I said, back to the days when I had to try to ignore the annoyance of glasses in classes, I spent a lot of time walking around only seeing the fluffy outlines of everything around me and relying more on the other senses. Nowadays, if I did not care for my eye health, I could enjoy the clear view 24/7, but what occurred to my long before was that I do not particularly hate being near-sighted. It is regrettable, but I don't take my nearsightedness as an enemy. In fact, I would say it is an unfortunate element in my life having turned into a helpful adjustment. Why so? Well, I remember reading a comic strip where a myopic little girl, who forgets her glasses one day, is amazed at the discovery of a whole different pretty view of the world, which is not my case. For me, it serves as a filter. I guess its function has something to do with my disorders of receiving the outside signals, as if there is something wrong with my antennas or the processing procedures, by which I mean, seeing a clear world can be too much for me. The bright colors, the easily identified people, the details of the buildings and streets, the signs, etc.,they are too much for me, and I always react. I cannot simply ignore them, and being sensitive to them, the tendency to try to interpret, correlate, abstract, conclude or transform the "ordinary" things exhausts me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I am incapable to turn it down only by my own will, therefore I often find myself "unequipped" when I want some rest, because without any glasses or contacts, there, between me and the outside, a filter is installed, preventing the external flow from overwhelming the land, which can be left in peace to be only disturbed by the "interior" floods. Of course it is no trouble-free space but the water level becomes lower, isn't it?

Old Habit Kicks In Again

The thing is whenever I qualify this kind of things "unfinished", I've  no idea about its final state, "finished".

Bingo

Let's say, you have this feeling giving you the urge to say "eurêka!". You have the feeling that you've found something but still confused because without knowing beforehand what you have been looking for or being able to get a hold of the concrete entity, you cannot identify the found, which may be upsetting, because of the mixture of exhilaration of discovering and confusion caused by the uncertainty of the discovery. So, is there a way to solve it? Is it possible to trace back, since it is highly possible this situation resulted from the fact that this discovery may be made by certain instinct, (or else, shall we say, something on the subconscious level?) from the way one had traveled to discover. To reveal the nature of the process to reveal the nature of the result, which involves plenty of "revealing oneself", I suppose. See, as a child, I would often secretly pity the adults expressing their regrets that they lost their youth and did not get what they want, but sometimes it was not their regrets but the things they said they wanted but did not get that looked more pitiable. I would say to myself, " so what if you had spent all your life after that and had gotten that? It would still have sounded boring."(Was I than cynical at 12?) I guess the expressions on their face sacred me into my working my ass off in the later days to avoid that, but it is essential to get the nature of my findings right. I know, I am classified by many as "the unsettling factor" or "the lost one", which I've been told repeatedly, but what they don't know is that the "lost" appearance may be simply due to the momentarily unidentified discoveries I've made, the equivalents of which in their lives seem more obvious and less controversial. Let me clarify, I am not against their norms but I am only against the norms trying to force their way into my private sphere, because they can sometimes blind me into agreeing on the "lost" appearance, while when I look in retrospect in my lucid mind, I am amazed at the how much I been through and how close I am getting to something that fits me, which I could not even have dreamt of back then. So I guess the question now is to formulate it properly in order to make sure that I stick to it.

Dream

I can easily trick myself into denial, but usually a superficial form of denial, which means I simply stop pronouncing the word the notion of which I think I should be dubious about by reasoning, which normally involve those, mostly positive, with more or less extravagant tones, (I do say fabulous, fantastic, amazing quite often, but only for the sake of expressing an exclamation without bothering to define them.), e.g. dream. I use dream in its basic literal sense neutrally as in "I had a dream last night. I dreamt of a speaking dog." etc., whereas figuratively or metaphorically I might mention nightmare but seldom dream referring to the future as something aspirational or hopeful, and facing the optimist friends shouting out "I am a person with dreams (to achieve)!", annoyed and nauseated is usually what I feel, which is paradoxical, since I've discovered that I am the type of creature which feeds on dreams. I know some say the more zen attitude is to focus on the "now" and the dependence on the future can be as heavy a burden as that on the past, and that we may enter a less troubled state of mind with less desires, but I am not able to do so, or am I not old enough to be that serene? Anyway, I see desire more of a friend than an enemy that the miseryfree fearfree desirefree comfortable time was a threat to me, because there was nothing to want. However, along time, as so many have repeatedly filled the contents of dream with what I've been busying myself to escape to a point I no longer feel it relevant, I did not realize that from the very beginning the hue of my perception of the world was set by the dream by someone who cosseted me in a way my parents would not even do. She never told me what to do, what goal to achieve or who to become, which I wouldn't have understood anyway, but simply patched my sails and sharpened my wings and then pointed afar and said, "go". I don't know if I should thank or blame her, thank her for the unusual road I've traveled and still on, blame her for having to deal with moments of being lost. All that written, I know I am being unreasonable to hold someone responsible for what I've been experiencing, which I myself find surprising, but I guess I just miss her so much and cannot neglect the joke that she who started my dream did not hold on to hers. Somehow, I do not want to continue lingering in the wreckage of the ship, because for those which are still sailing, there are still storms to come for which one should prepare for. I know my discomfort with a word cannot be changed overnight but the realization that the rejection of the signifying does not imply that of the signified can be quite deliberating and that not naming something does not mean my denying to its existence which I never stop sculpturing, so next time I should give some extra thought about whether my whole vision is really that somber.