edges

There's this new show called my generation. Don't you feel like doing a show like that? Go back to high school? I suppose that's the allure of 10 year reunions...but I really want to go back further, middle school maybe, the wallflower. In high school I had just enough friends, enough good grades, enough quick quips and enough tenuous connections, to be lost in the shuffle, to be exceedingly ordinary. The one most extraordinary moment was the last week of high school, when my psych class taped blank sheets on our backs and wrote on anonymous nice things about each other. Then we chose one to read out loud and whoever wrote it could own up to it. One person wrote: I love your personality, seriously, I don't know what it is but I am attracted to it.

Of course I read that one out loud.

It was one of the more popular kids, kind of rebellious and never took classes too seriously. (Or as far as his asian parents would allow him to, I guess). It's incredibly shallow how much I secretly treasure that incident. Not because he was in the circle, but simply because I was in another one. Isn't it weird how extraneous players barely skimming the limits of your radius can be affected by you--and more powerfully, in turn, you by them? To be honest my effect on him has probably already washed out along with the last carefree summer before college, but the echo back to me resounds still. Not because of us or because of high school but because of something bigger, because it's a reminder that someone out there with no liability to you as a parent or friend, might presently be vaguely charmed by you. And isn't that a pleasant thought? So going back to the beginning of the post...

In our generation, where we pour our thoughts into condensed texts and behind computer screens (note the irony), where indifference rules with the iron-clad hand, where not even the most intimate act will merit anything except an awkward hello in the halls, will those moments only become more and more spare? Will we cease realize the quaint powers of charm and attraction? Will those who linger on our peripheral outlines spill over to the other side of the horizon?

**

keys

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
—

Don DeLillo in Point Omega

I had a similar conversation today about how there are things one knows that she will never tell out loud. Not even to her mother or the boy she is in love with or her journal. Some secrets are tantamount to the most physically impenetrable of safes. And it's not because of their precious value, but because of the value in their transaction. What happens when it is transferred to another? Will the sheer weight of them (embarrassment, shame, the heaviest of emotions) anchor down a relationship that would have otherwise taken flight? These are safes we are sure that no sliver of chance could ever peep out of. Though the thought that they represent our most accurate selves? Shudder. There will indeed be keys that allow us to know these selves, though for all but the bravest of us, they lie abandoned, faintly glittering in the shadow of our pretenses.

**

beginnings (or the illusions of)

I like the word September. I like how the syllables tumble out of my mouth as my tongue folds and unfolds. I like how no matter how loudly you say it, it invariably mellows out to a rhythmic murmur. I like how it's long but spelled just like how it sounds. Sep-TEM-Ber. This makes for great ease when spelling it on forms yet still maintaining a sense of accomplishment afterwords.

This all might be due to my birth month bias. But I don't think it's exclusively that: it's just a pretty word. It conjures up all these subtle images of slightly chilly breezes, of the first time waking up with the comforter still snuggled around you, of fresh smelling nights when the temperature, and you, teeter on some sort of change.

It's really a month of rebirth, I wonder if this intuition was weaved into the architects of the academic calendar. Or maybe I have the causal relation wrong--maybe it's really because my life has been constructed this way that I associate a pivotal quality with this month. I'd like to think it's the former; the word is too special to be borne out of term papers and three hole punched notebook shopping. Instead, I will probably continue to choose to believe in the romantic tendencies of the creators of schooling, add them to the growing list of people I photoshop and idealize, add another collision of the way things are and the way things should be to my mental revelations, add September to my box of illusions, along with other trinkets too pretty to shatter.

**

losing the self

“No one likes to have their sincerity questioned...the spontaneous act...is prized for its unimpeachable authenticity, yet the mind is fast enough that speed is no guarantor of truth. Everyone is always aware of how they look, even when they weep.”
—

Mills

This is so true. Most acts that pour out of me are tinged with self-awareness, not simply awareness of the act itself. The only times when self-awareness almost disappear into the background is when pursuing, ironically, beauty. Beauty not of the self as perceived by others, but beauty of an external something as perceived by the self. It’s the only thing that has power enough to take your breath away—and with that breath the last of you—if only for a moment. And in that exceedingly rare needle of a second, we have pure, pure sincerity. If that instant is sustained, maybe even a truly spontaneous act can be borne, such is something completely of the self, such is something utterly unpoisoned by a societal self, such is the accidental fruit of beauty itself.

**

guilt

After a careless mention last night, my mom murmured: oh that's right, your birthday's coming up. I barely registered this mis-memory. My birthdays have always been long-awaited, carefully planned, and came predictably with a cake of choice in my family (the only one that ever was--with my dad's birthday 3 days afterwards and my mom's a day after that, they always simply ate the leftovers of my festivities.)

A few years ago I would've minded my mom's atypical forgetting last night. A few years ago I did mind. For my 14th birthday, my mom was in bed with a stomachache, and no one mentioned anything as my dad dropped his work to tend to her. When I asked him about my day he snapped: we'll figure it out later, can't you see that your mom is sick? I got so mad I walked to the mall by myself and bought a quiznos sub. (Believe me, I wish I had a better story of rebellion, as this one is not only unimaginative and un-destructive, it's also just plain weird.) Then I felt terrible and nervous that I took it to-go and came right back, (Wish I was making this up...) when my dad promptly yelled at me for being so selfish.

A few months later my mom had her miscarriage. In her rage and pain I was the most terrified than I've ever been, so my dad sat me down and told me how hard it was on her. How it was her second miscarriage this year.

When was the first one? How come I didn't know?
Do you remember your mom's stomachache on your birthday? The fetus flushed out of her system then. It was a natural miscarriage.

The next year the birthday cakes resumed. And I was again the only child my parents bought cake for.

I feel a lot of guilt over my mom's miscarriages. Because of that incident. Because I think when they told me about her (second) pregnancy, beaming from ear to ear, they could tell I wasn't exactly thrilled. And even because when they came home from the doctor's on that fateful day, I was online when I wasn't supposed to be, so I signed off and rushed out to greet them a little too cheerfully, with a little too big a smile, the trace of which barely had time to leave my face as my mother's bloodshot look of hatred seared past me. At that moment there was guilt, I thought the look meant I was caught and she knew what I had been doing; panicked guilt.

Of course, none of these things are even remotely relevant to the outcomes. But we know that the deepest guilt never really have to make sense at all. When we unpack the buried wounds we find not knives but cardboard. Still, the cuts we carry remain exactly as they are. And I wish their poison too, would flush out of us.

**

beginngs or the illusions of

I like the word September. I like how the syllables tumble out of my mouth as my tongue folds and unfolds. I like how no matter how loudly you say it, it invariably mellows out to a rhythmic murmur. I like how it's long but spelled just like how it sounds. Sept-Em-Ber. This makes for great ease when spelling it on forms yet still maintaining a sense of accomplishment afterwords.

This all might be due to my birth month bias. But I don't think it's exclusively that. It's just a pretty word. It conjures up all these subtle images of slightly chilly breezes, of the first time waking up with the comforter still snuggled around you, of fresh smelling nights when the temperature, and you, teeter on some sort of change.

It's really a month of rebirth, I wonder if this intuition was weaved into the architects of the academic calendar. Or maybe I have the causal relation wrong--maybe it's really because my life has been constructed this way that I associate a pivotal quality with this month. I'd like to think it's the former, it's too special to be borne out of term papers and three hold punched notebook shopping. Instead, I will probably continue to choose to believe in the romantic tendencies of the creators of schooling, add them to the growing list of people I photoshop and idealize, add another collision of the way things are and the way things should be to my mental revelations, add September to my box of illusions, along with other trinkets too pretty to shatter.

**

fight or flight

I've been tagged in a lot of pictures online recently and I've untagged probably a third of them. Usually I pretend I'm above this kind of silliness, but my burgeoning face in the photos is more than cringe-worthy enough. Every time I go back to college I gain some weight, and every time I gain weight it goes to my face. I hate it. And I also hate myself for saying this: I really just don't like myself when I get to this point. I don't like the way I look, and I hate the way it makes me feel. It's all the consequences of my lack of self-control literally stamped on my face. And it doesn't matter if some don't see it. Out of towners didn't know what the scarlet letter meant, but that didn't change the weight of the shame it carried. My friends think I'm crazy, my mother, even more predictably, promptly tells me to lose 10 lbs. I can't tell who swims in the deeper end of delusion. I can't tell which admonition will get me out. If you meet self-loathing, should you simply cross over to another path or blast it away from this one?

**