Month: October 2019

Missing Manila, mispronouncing vignettes

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Trying out reading.supply

https://reading.supply/@chia/missing-manila-V1E6eJ

october’s series of trailing thoughts

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Alone on the New Haven green at 4AM on a Sunday morning. In this moment of time I wonder why I am and all I ever will be.

I wonder what it must feel like to be rich and have the ability to throw everything away into a sabbatical, pray myself a meaning. I’ve been praying for sixteen years and it brought me nowhere. What does it feel like to have everything and want to reduce yourself to nothing? What must it feel like to have the liberty of finding yourself and doing the right thing when you have the liberty of freedom and choice?

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Finished two midterms. Thinking ridiculously deeply about the bigger picture: what I’m working for, why I’m here. How much time is left there? I can’t say I’m alone — I never really am. The whole world is there with me, but I haven’t been with it.

Reading about protests in Hong Kong. The LRT on fire. Figuring out how I can structure words better after I think about code all day. Thinking about fucking pre-incrementing pointers to pointers and the shifting of papers and how I was sitting in a lecture hall amidst flasks and hoodies thinking only about the fire and the fire and the time I was losing. This is not right.

When do I get to be in this space of learning? Nowhere else — but so am I deeply enclosed in thinking about hypotheticals and bubbles. Maybe this is just crisis because I’ve been looped out of school for weeks and I don’t have a job. Maybe this is just crisis because I’ve touched upon so many of these things in this world and I have no desire to do any of them.

Remembering everything vividly. The two-hour bus ride home, leaning and falling into the empty aisle in front of everyone. That smile dog picture that I accidentally opened in a forum post when I was 9. My self-harm keloids that still won’t fucking fade.

About who I will die with matters upon every conversation I’m in. The mascara that accidentally got on my eyelids. My professor telling me I look like I’m so fucking tired with eyes of pity and the other who talks to me like an old friend. Revealing my traumas in English class and never crying for an entire semester. The spreadsheet I open in Starbucks at 6:20 in the morning and my folder of 80+ cover letters — this is just as bad as applying to college was except there’s no going back.

Maybe all I was meant to do was write. Write code, write stories, write emails and thank yous and newsletters for seven undergraduate organizations, write apologies, write plans, write check-ins and write my Tinder bio (those two lines) over and over and over again and in the process maybe I will fall in love with something or someone or this life again.

And maybe I was never meant to get this far in this world.