26

These days, I don't really know what to write anymore. Except the habit of writing when I feel this way is so ingrained in me that I find myself now, typing for the sake of typing. Reflexively, directionless, spiralling perhaps, but still enjoying the way the words gently roll onto the screen, accompanied by the rhythmic thump of the keyboard.

I am freshly 26. For the first time, it is an instance where I feel my age, where there is no need for an adjustment period, for me to shed my old age, and don the new one. 25 feels like a lifetime ago, and 26 is the new reality. It is perhaps because I have never felt this way before, and if so, not to this extent. I feel tired, such that I have pondered whether to finish writing or to just leave this be altogether. But it is only 9PM, too early to sleep, and so I will write because it is better than the alternative of not writing.

I don't know what to write anymore. The only thing that brings me some semblance of significance these days is reading, and even that makes me cry sometimes because of how familiar beautiful things still are, and how I am able to recognize it. Writing this makes me want to cry. But that doesn't mean much because it seems like I have become an expert at crying over nothing at all these days. I want to say it is because of being bored or overworked or stressed, as I had concluded before, but I don't think it is truly, not at it's core. At it's core, it is because I am heartbroken. Or I was. And even though it has passed and I am meant to forget, I cannot, such that in quiet moments, I continue to break my own heart, over and over again.

This is not a call for pity. Everyone knows that pity only makes people cry harder. This is simply meant as a mark in a tree, carved with an pocket knife, to state "I was here". So that I do not make waste of all this emotion, that maybe at least some good writing will come out of it. I've been reading Sylvia Plath's diaries, and it is like drinking a cup of red wine. Rich and indulgent yet biting and incisive. A punch in the gut, but in the gentlest of ways possible, because she surprisingly quite likeable and down to earth in her intelligence. You want to read her sentences twice. The first time because it is so distractingly beautiful in the way it reads, the second time, to actually process the words and make sense of what she is saying. Take this paragraph:

“Lord, what will I be? Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity and stimulus lead me? Someday I may say: It was of great significance that I sat and laughed at myself in a convertible with the rain coming down in rattling sheets on the canvas roof. It influenced my life that I did not find content immediately and easily - - and now I am I because of that. It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one - not at all. And I may say that my philosophy has been deeply affected by the fact that windshield wipers ticked off seconds too loudly and hopelessly, that my clock drips loud sharp clicks too monotonously on my hearing. I can hear it even through the pillow I muffle it with - the tyrannical drip drip drip drip of seconds along the night. And in the day, even when I'm not there, the seconds come out in little measured strips of time. And I wind the clock. And I look at the windshield wipers cutting an arch out of the sprinkled raindrops on the glass. Click-click. Clip-clip. Tick-tick. snip-snip. And it goes on and on. I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me - draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”

I have no idea what she is trying to say, except I also do. The vague blob of the sentiment she is trying to convey somehow strikes me right in the center, it makes sense in a way I cannot explain. Which is probably why she is the writer and I the reader.

Today is Sunday night, and for the last few hours, I have pondered whether I am dreading and anticipating Monday. I dread because it means another week until the weekend, and I anticipate because it means something to do, instead of counting down the hours until the blank space of the weekend is over again. How does this even make sense. I spend my weekends chasing the week, and the week chasing the weekends, all with the end goal of making time pass by faster because I have run out of ideas on what to do with it. How is this a normal sentiment at 26? Shouldn't time feel like it is flying by? Shouldn't I feel like time is always not enough, such that I am living with vigorous urgency, which is arguably what living in the sense of feeling alive should be? Instead I am 26 and cursed with the expectation of what living should feel like, while not living it at all, as I sit here, watching time spill away like black molasses.

Some friends have texted just now to make plans for this upcoming Saturday. I've responded "sounds amazing to me!!!". I do not feel like three exclamation marks in a row. At best, I feel like one exclamation mark separated by lots and lots of spaces, such that I am always hopping from one exclamation mark to the next, like Mario in a video game, looking for the next block to hang onto momentarily for the pure sake of trying to keep up with the screen that is always moving forwards, forwards.

I bet Sylvia Plath wouldn't have understood a word of that.

I think I am done writing now. I don't really know how to end this off. Maybe with a poem that I find myself reading recently in the mornings. When I am sad or happy, art suddenly makes a lot more sense. Sure things are beautiful at face value, but dig a layer down and there is a different kind of beauty in it's resonance, when someone much smarter, much older, much more experienced in feeling captures in words the exact way you feel. In times like these, there is no greater comfort in knowing that you are completely unoriginal.

This poem makes me feel sad, because every time he writes about his heart breaking, almost on cue mine will break too. I know the heartbreak of thrilling rain and riding the train and waking up all too well. To be living in a world teeming with life, and yet for it to break your heart for that precise reason. But I like this poem not for that. I like this poem because I think it is deceivingly optimistic, in a heartbreaking sort of way of course. There's a dream I have in which I love the world. He says it's a dream, but I know it is more than that, it is a past reality. No one who has not loved the world can write it about it like that. No one who has not loved the world can know what it feels like to run your fingers through windy hair. It is the kind of foolish love that only someone with a stupid heart can feel, and write about and flawlessly pull off. And like you, I too was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.