Joyously depressing

Today was what you could call bittersweet.

I don't really want to use that word though, because somehow it sounds sad. My day was, as I called it, joyously depressing. Like how you'd see the people in an insane asylum laughing away, unaware about their conditions.

It started with my daily morning stroll to Mountbatten station. Because first class started at 8, I had to leave my Paya Lebar house by 6. The silence was peaceful and at the same time eerie, and there weren't any cats or people around. No birds chirping. Pretty much like how solitude comforts yet kills.

When I got to school, a song called "Happy" came next on my playlist. It lifted my spirits, even when I'd been thinking of the sad things in life throughout my bus journey.

A long time ago, I read the English lyrics of this song; contrary to its joyous and upbeat tune, it's about letting go of someone who means the world to you; how you've lost yours, but that you wish they'd find their own happiness.

That's when I realised that it doesn't matter how sad your lyrics are. As long as you have a happy tune, everything will be alright. The happy is all that everyone hears and sees.

And then I had a fight with one of the few people who means a lot to me. This fag has always meant a lot, but I don't show it, and he knows that. Regardless of my newly found hatred for guys and my declared statement of I don't want to care anymore, somehow I actually do, but I don't know how to prove it.

I don't know how to show it. I don't even know if my affection for this person is good enough. Because judging from what he'd said, it looks like my presence hasn't made any impact on him for the past 2 months of our friendship. It seems that I haven't made any difference, whether or not I'm in his life. I could go on giving him the silent treatment for days and he'd never notice I was gone.

I spent my three hours lunch break completing the book I started on yesterday. It's one of those books where you have to get into it without having a clue what it's about, so I'm not gonna say much about it.

It's a funny one, yet at the same time depressing because it poked and prodded hard at me, right in the most sensitive spots of my past 18 years. I had to take a few deep breaths each time its plot twisted suddenly, had to let a few tears slip when I imagined myself in the protagonist's place.

By the time I read to its end, I couldn't hold it anymore. I tossed the book aside and ran to the toilet, where I hid in a cubicle and cried my eyes out. In the middle of my bawling, I caught my reflection [there's a mirror in every cubicle in my school's Atrium toilet] and, seeing how ugly I looked, started to laugh at my silliness.

It's just a book, I told myself. It's just a little paperback, just words in devious placements, forming sentences and paragraphs that became knives, stabbing you in the heart again and again. I smiled and wiped my tears away. It's just a book.

I didn't know whether I should label it 'better than', or 'worse than', in comparison to the book that stirred everyone else's hearts, The Fault In Our Stars. This book I'd read was better than that because its plot was not expected at all and I related to it better, but at the same time it was worse because it'd made me cry harder. [then again, if a book were to touch your heart so deeply like that, I'm pretty sure that makes it a good one]

I had to make my way to class after that, where I'd suffered a terrible book hangover. I couldn't stop thinking of the ending, of the characters, of the world through the protagonist's eyes. It felt like I was still stuck in the world of the book, still on Beechwood Island.

And then I looked down at my arms. The thin white stripes on the black background of my sleeves brought me back to 2011.

And at that moment, I lost all my senses. I didn't know what was reality anymore.
I got it mixed
with the world of the books I'd read
with the world I fantasise living in
with the alternate universe where the other 'me' was living the life I never had
with my Dreamworld
with the past.

I didn't know what was going on anymore, and that made me want to laugh
and cry
at the same time.

I'm in my own asylum. One part of me laughs too hard at the smallest things, another keeps her chin too high until only the insides of her nose could be seen, which disgusted and chased others away. The other parts are trapped in my head, yelling again and again, I'm not crazy, I want out, help me, I'm not supposed to be here. Another part yells Leave me the fuck alone. I'm fine on my own. Leave me be.

But the biggest soul of them all speaks, and immediately the rest of these voices shut up. The biggest soul in me simply says:

Today was a bittersweet day, but I wouldn't really use that word because it sounds too sad.
Today was joyously depressing.
In a way that the patients in an insane asylum would laugh like mad, unaware of their conditions.