230224 - What happens in my day
XVI.
It’s something similar to the way strands of hair poke my eyes in the humid, warm mornings. The unfinished charcoal flower lying on my desk. I fell in love, three years ago. She told me once the world was closing in on her, like the pillars of a temple dedicated to a long-dead god. Like this, I can remember a place of worship that welcomed few to its congregation. At that time I was content with that. Instead of entering, I played in the cornfields surrounding the odd little circle. I don’t think I can tell you what it is, anymore.
==> Today
I woke up this morning. My life is beautiful in the way that existing is. I woke up and stared into the sun, challenging her. As I mourned and my tears flew into the bucket by the window as a sacrifice, the sun defeated me and I fell back into a long sleep.
So, I woke up late. I was upset, and got ready too fast. I dropped my lip gloss on the floor while the frigid water dripped from the faucet. It was cold. I was upset. I fell asleep on the bus again and realized I had woken up at least twenty times this morning.
I got on the bus. That thing is cramped, overfilled, humid, and shaky. An older girl, maybe a sophomore, asked if she could sit down next to me. I tried to lift my backpack in order to move it so she could sit, but it was a hundred pounds and I would have thrown it out the window right then if it wasn’t so fucking heavy. Inside was my unfinished homework and the book I dedicate more time to than all of my schoolwork combined. I was angry again, and realized how cold I was. Whenever this happens, I think to myself, why does America make us go to school so early? But it seems that my internal monologue always defies logic for the purpose of being the comedic background voice in my everyday life. I blame the unmoving country I have spent like ten years of my life in. What is the point in looking outside?
For a while now, I have suffered from a lingering sadness in my mind. I learned how to set an opaque tarp over all of it by overstuffing my schedule, finding new things to learn about, reading, writing, and painting. I go out with my friends. My homework schedule is absolutely absurd; I go from studying for a test to practicing violin. I take a new hour out of the calendar every day and steal it from my sleep, I mold that singular hour to whatever I want to do, dedicating it to myself. It’s always at midnight or later.
Emotions are something I create; I have gained such an innate understanding of them over the years that I know exactly what to say to anyone. I know when to tell someone, “Wow, I really love this class”, but I also know when to say, “Want to skip this one?”, even if my own thoughts are quite different. Expression is a color, a pigment that I keep on my document titled numbered thoughts. I think in the abstract, so I don’t bother myself with details. My thoughts are surrealistic, dramatic, sorted into buckets and grouped with an elaborate metaphor.
In my last period, 普通話課, I embarrass myself (like usual), my broken spoken Mandarin showing through my fairly good handwriting; my dedication to stroke order doesn’t mean anything when I say 臥室 instead of 我是. The bus is full because I was late — the reason being that my friend and I were lamenting about the class for exactly three minutes after the bell rang, three minutes that could have been spent racing to Door 11 and making it outside before each seat on the bus was stuffed by Starbucks-wanting seniors that somehow have failed to obtain their driver’s licenses. I ask the same girl who sat next to me this morning if I can sit next to her. I immediately regret it when she and her friend start watching something on her phone together, the friend draping himself over the back of the seat she and I are sitting in. I glance over and it’s actually a show I like as well. I ignore it — common interests don’t mean much when it seems like we’re living in two different worlds.
With my sticker-decorated Sony wired headphones consistently falling off my head every time I nod asleep, I think to myself, Aren’t I so lonely? I am surrounded by people, interesting people, people that know me, people that I don’t know. Despite this, I write stories of empty fields and abandoned chapels. I write poems about endless amounts of open area, planets reaching for each other trillions of light-years apart, shadows that are pink and green and all the different colors. Within them must be the opportunity for I, lovesick for space, wishful for ocean and sun and star, to exist, exist independently. My writings are about the women who washed their clothes in a bubbling stream a thousand years ago, and the children who painted their nails red with the clay from that creek. I exist within this infinite plane of static life, each copy of myself super-glued to a fixed centimeter, for a goal that I’m not sure I want to reach anymore.