- I am scared of the ocean but I go so deep into it in the night that I swallow saltwater, mouthful after mouthful until there’s more salt than oxygen in the lung.
- My self-destruction must be its own form of ritual suicide.
- I miss the girl in high school who used to download my Gumroad poetry chapbook and make fun of it (her email showed that she downloaded it over eight times). She might fucking love this.
- I love when nobody knows where I am.
- All I want is for my table to be filled, for the people I love to know how much I witness them, to have people be hungry with me
- Is this all you’ve ever felt at this moment?
- Everything that fuels this sadness is childish and stupid…
- Wondering why I still can’t find meaning when I’ve tried nearly everything that people said to try. All I can do is make my own, the most disgusting form of it.
- I love when people are surprised to find out that I was very much born and raised in the Philippines—a place I have difficult talking about to anyone who isn’t from here. I love that it’s the source of all my inner conflict—that is, my relationship with home—yet it’s so insignificant and meaningless in everyone’s reading of me.
- Maybe I should’ve been clearer with myself earlier: I love grand gestures. I want obnoxious public performance, I want to make a fool out of this life until it’s there no longer. An inclination towards privacy and isolation doesn’t mean that some bits can be performed, in the sense of entertainment and function.
- I love to talk as if everyone has already left me.
- Every time I grab a meal with someone in this stupid fucking university and sense how every relationship from hereon is just waiting until the next empty meal I think it’s okay to withdraw in the first place.
- At the summit of a little park you usually hike in your first month or so at university with people you either never see again or live with for the next four years (the only two options in life, really): I Imagine what my life could be like if it weren’t so small. I imagine my head on the rocks below.
- I love to make spaces and then leave them.
- Every time I think seriously about dying I buy myself flowers and see if I can outlast them.
- Stroking my friends’ hand as she texts her family and partner she loves them in her other hand while gripping mine tighter. The last thing I think about here is more of how we’ve figured out spotlights and that pretty soft, smooth diffused lighting the tops of the aisles of aircrafts. Everything around me was someone’s lifework—I needed nothing else to feel loved in the face of disaster.
- When I scrape together pamphlets, shells, pressed flowers, and the textures of the environment, I come to think that I have a slight hoarding problem.
- I love being the last choice in this world. Even the last choice has been alive and sustained for so long.
- So sorry about the lack of presence.
- My laptop dies in the middle of finals! Last night I emailed my professors about how three people in my plane were injured and brought to the hospital and how I really can’t think of anything! My slow cinema paper can wait a day or two! My professor cries when she sees me walk into class with my forearms bleeding—is this part, the conditions of all of it, hard to believe?
- When I was 21 and lost all my material belongings from before college I was like okay great and just spending money on all useless things and freaking out when I was losing the money… how the material world gives us nothing but takes and takes away.
- When I was 20 I lived with a distant cousin for a year who would always give me a spoon and fork to eat with, because that’s how we do it in the Philippines. She would always remember that. I walked around the house like a ghost with disordered eating habits and never left it and lost my mind and though we have some of the same struggles I realized so acutely that year how the way I thought was so fundamentally different and broken and how our languages of love were so different but alike and then I knew I knew I knew I would not make it to 30 with a baby in the suburbs like her
- 22 and I still speak of myself like a meek child.
- Crying out loud because I wonder what my life would be like if the thought of ending it wasn’t on my head, every waking second.
- I suppose I should be proud of living a life so different from everyone else here while still making it to somewhat of the same place, but all I feel is nauseous and null. Is this all there is? I have…
- Gentler with the world, softer with others, more patient and present—nothing gives. I think I will be fucked up forever; it’s no longer funny. I want to be sufficient. I want to think that I can one day feel understood. I want to be a vessel for thoughts and life; I want to feel as loved as what some of the things I have made let other people feel. I want to know where I’ll live in a month. I want to know that I will not be alone forever. I want to know that loneliness is an enduring, embracing thing that I might be comfortable with—or not. I want my body to feel heavy and to feel that I can carry it, or have someone else carry it. I want to be more than sufficient, even. I want the way I see the world, when I can think of it fondly and without the dying parts, to not die with me. I want the little bits of beauty and meaning I fashion to have meant something to someone else. I want people to believe that nothing is fleeting and that everything we are and ever will be is persisting and just as unique—because we felt this way and have existed this way and so all existences before us will build on this and be made new. I want others to believe that nothing is every really the same. I want to act on my understanding of the choice we make being other people and minds; that everything else is variable but the people.
- Obsessed with the idea that “nobody thinks of you” as a comforting thought; I like to think of everyone, and so do many others. Many people live lives thinking of everyone so much that they never even think about themselves. Not me, though, I’m writing a blog post about my feelings.
- Every time I experience a ‘last moment’ I love to look onto the sky, into the embrace of nothing, the only thing that has been there for me this whole time.
- My heart would like to feel the very bottom of spring.
May 7, 2022
Reading Time: 4 minutes