I am sinking my guts as fervently as I feel the pen sliding across my throat, twisting my organs, slithering across a paper of items I do not understand. My mind flashes back to every single failure that we have ever sung. Every lapse of ungreatness and unfulfilled fervor is a crime to humanity. An unabiding dishonor of traipse for the ones who carry my name to lament. This is a foul cry for the ones who do not deserve to do so — whittled down to self-depreciation at the instant.
Wherever it started, whatever had happened — they’ve all clung to this despondent nothingness. A melancholia for the person that I had never been, not once a sign of forgiveness for the person that I could be. We are destined, intertwined, by faith and numbers and chance and cash and time and lovers and passion and spirit and uncountable things that remain out of our control; as we are destined by faith to crash and die. My fondest memories from my childhood were not of my victories; never the dances for participation medals on stage or the old photobook memories that I never knew were captured for visiting passersby to giggle at and condemn their own children for. I vividly recall my mind turmoiling, twisting, turning, attempting to unravel the way numbers and foreign symbols were put together. Sort of the same kind that happens when I try to speak – English, my fond darling, a lost trickster descending on the tips of my tongue and stealing away the full voracity of what once was. It boils down to sitting down, the breeze of an air conditioner in a once familial home and listening to an estranged cousin laughing at numbers and formulas and things that I do not understand. Running it again in an old machine and collapsing over combinations of letters and formulas and unknown meanings — I’ve torn down cities but the inability to grasp because I do not know is what crumbles everything that I had ever built up.
Devout non-believer in my ability to succeed; I swear to god that all my problems are the riddled inconsequential. It is like every manifestation of my fear is churned down, it is like I am a master of deceit to the outside when I have trouble explaining my own head to myself. It is like I do more than just sit in front of a laptop, one single meal a day, and pretend that I have anything in common with names that never come across my mind. It is like I have to confine myself into a single .pdf, accosted for every part of myself that doesn’t fit into a picturesque dreamscape laid out in 12 pt sans-serif. It is like I am blamed for every part of myself that isn’t given up for someone or something else — and when I fit, intrepid and dauntless in the gaze of fools, I am an impostor. I am nothingness. I am a false-pretense preacher when I cannot save myself. I am a hypocrite. I am a fraud. I am nothing that I had ever wanted to be.
…
A lesson on revisionism isn’t the solution. My anger manifests itself in what I could have done better. I don’t regret showing up for a scholarship competition and miraculously making it to the top 6 in the entirety of a region — I regret the feigned apathy as I stared down a paper of problems that I didn’t know how to tackle. I regret sitting in that hall two years ago, giving up and calling forfeit to a future with the sound of lead and paper rampaging my head. For every moment that I had sunk and drowned with the weight of not knowing, I live in disbelief with the position and titles and names that I have strung. God, I am sorry for not believing. And god, am I sorry that I want to do everything that I love but have not spared enough time for so; forgive me for the mass of the world that I could have been a part of. Forgive the selfish disavowment.
Can you destroy a world when you live in a machine where everything is self-run? Every cog, every toil, it’s something forlorn and empty down the surface. Can I become the greatest act, the unretractable finale of a disappearance mesmerized down blank sheets of newspaper and sad signs? I’m combing my sadness into something like anger, and that anger into self-deprecating disappointment that shatters skulls and breaks down worlds. I am a self-proclaimed god of anger and irritability. I am the greatest liar I’ll ever have the privilege of being.
…
I am still staring down papers and skinning myself alive for things that no human is expected to know. I am still comparing my past ghosts and begging to twist their minds into believing in something earlier on. I am still writing a tab away from the thing I preach and forever away of sending off for four years on something on it. I live as an empty widow in the corner, an armada scorched of burnout dreams and inflated egos.
The last stretch of this megalomanic dream is to fall for the impossible.
Maybe, I’ll begin writing again — the only thing that I have ever been good at in terms of scores and numbers. I will waste a slot, throw it all away in fear of numbers and formulas; just like how I sat in my bedroom searching for what those meant put together, six or seven years ago. On a good day, my fingertips won’t dance on muck, flakes, and blood. I will be okay with where I stand. I will finish that book. I will feel a little bit more alive again. Under dim lights and fervent erasures and begs for forgiveness, everything will make sense in my head. I can ask for forgiveness for everyone that I had ever asked, that had to bend over backwards and stoop down for me. I will learn how to refurbish the machine; tame myself and become something boiled down to numbers in the best way possible.
Because perhaps I am not needed with the way of lines and counts, and not everyone who lives is meant to do something of meaning. What a gift it is, and what a glorious moment it would be when at the very least, we could understand and be content with ourselves — of every fleeting moment, every failed device. It’s a theory that I’ve made of myself. No idea what I wanted to be, except that what I was doing was useless. A self-engrossed, narcissistic girl who stared down at mirrors and wondered why I was. Maybe if I had some semblance of who I was, I wouldn’t have to reach so unbearably, murderously high. And for now — maybe, I like the thrill of being in control of so many things; a fleeting whirl of blankness because I swore that I would discover myself if I just kept getting out there. Few things that ground me are left in shattered pieces, the forever-repeated songs that revel in sadness and blind misery. What were once conversations were distant vows as I could no longer relate, as I grew angry at everyone who had ever held contempt for being something and making a meaning of themselves. The only things that mattered were making a difference and doing things and how could you all be spending your time on this and all the while, I was walking stomach-empty in the halls of places I should have known, lurking in the crevices of familiar names and wondering to what god do I have to compare myself to – to have some mark of where I am, where I was, where I am going.
…
Likely, I actually don’t know where all this is coming from other than an attempt to be better.
I am competing against myself, looking at others and wondering why I can’t catch up and be that good, fighting against my past mistakes, criticizing the click of my mind and the inability to grasp and speak and be.
I want to change the world; it’s a solemn vow that not many ever meet. The same thing as how we all swear to write a book someday. Or to find our passion and excel in it like it’s all there is. Or how we swear to people we will never meet again.
And what a godly liar I am, swearing that I would make it somewhere or be someone.
…
I still crumble at the foot of my desk, wondering what went so wrong with me as to make me incapable of comprehending a test item. Or wondering why I wasn’t born the prodigy that everyone ought to be (when I drown myself in comparisons and what-ifs). I seize moments where an ounce of belief comes, and I let it fall and pass in restless reassurance that I am not worthy of it.
To start doing things that mean something — not to the world, but to my own self — that is when I realize that there’s something out there. I will live for what’s in between the lines of the paper that summarizes my being. I will write books for the sake of writing them. I will find myself, unreliant on things outside of my will. I will breathe in the world that I had made for myself, and mold the world that I wish to make of others. Drill titans into the atmosphere and extinguish myself in the bedroom, where everything comes to rest — where I had thought about dying, and if I believed in god, whether I loved countless people, where I stood shivering in the night listening to the footsteps that did not belong under this roof. Everything succumbs and ends here; the overachiever that has it all is a lone vagabond in the confines of a room that never leaves, in a world that she knows she will never be a part of.
Perhaps here, in the stillness of forgotten evenings, I will unravel every formulaic throw at the person I am attempting to be. I will see the sun, and I will not beg it to die.