// foreshadowing 2020

In which I read back some old diary entries, nearly three years ago now, foreshadowing how I feel today.

17 06 20 // 11:30PM

It's been a long time since I've written in that I can't even remember how I used to write my dates. No slashes. Definitely no slashes.

Actually I'd started in yet another notebook in mid-2019 but it was left abandoned after a few pages. It's what happens when I don't practise much. Or when I stop making the effort to sit at a cafe with nothing but music and the thoughts in my head. Or maybe it's just what happens when you're finally happy.

I have a diamond ring on my left finger as I write this. That's how long I've been away and perhaps how far I've come. I'm still the same person who sees love in railway and hope in butterflies, yet I am infinitely different. I look how far I've come, and at the same time wonder about the other two roads.

I wonder how my 22-year-old self thinks things would be today, and what the future me would see in me when one looks back. But at the moment, I am alive and content. A few tiny concerns and some anxiety left, but nothing I can't go through. I have made worse decisions and walked rougher roads.

05 08 20 // 10:53PM

Always had the dilemma of suicide by what you love, or what you fear. While sympathy floated all around me for the two railway staff who got knocked down by an incoming train, all I had was jealousy. That was how I wanted to go. Well, that or drowning. Until now it's a decision to make.

But I always had a hidden fear. The fear of being someone else, of blending in. I do not want to be genetically modified... someone who doesn't stand out. I do not want to change the person I took a lifetime to be. To accept. The first time I voiced it out, it went out the car when his mother opened the door suddenly, asking if I could squeeze in the back instead.

The second time I expressed it was in type. I could not see his reaction and he did not offer any either. Not even the next morning, everything of yesterday basically forgotten. Until the third time, months later, when my expressions finally came accompanied with tears.

I do not want to be someone I'm not. The day I blend in will be the day I die, my past and art and metaphors seeping out of me. I do not want to be prim and proper, to wear clothes I am not comfortable with, to say sensible things. I want to always be the strange artist that I am, never shy to express any differences.

13 09 20 // 1:24PM

Why do people pretend to like rain so much, when it is our version of winter? Cold, dark, reminiscent of the worst of our time. Then again, on the equivalent of summer, the strangers show off their 'sun-kissed' skin to disguise the hatred for the heat, conveniently shown all over the other side of their pages.

I don't pretend. I don't mask my hatred and annoyance of the rain, from the splatter of droplets hitting my face to the sudden flash of lightning, reminiscent of photographs taken without my permission. I don't pretend to like the cold, rising my goosebumps and the puddles that obscure my usual routes, forcing me to find new ways to walk paths that should be familiar.

I don't have my balance, and no matter where I walk my steps are masked by mud and drowned by raindrops. Drops that once flourished, from the moment they leave their clouds of comfort to their demise on the sidewalk. Where they meet their fate of soaking my shoes. 

Where else am I supposed to rest or call solace when the light of my bedroom is louder than the buzzing in my head, a feat I thought impossible. A family and other half I once thought I could belong in, revealing their true motives of blending me into the rest of the nieces and wives? With headscarves and outfits that scream no personality despite what they try to portray?

I don't want to blend in with the lovers of rain and a god I don't quite believe in. I do not want to exist for anyone but myself even if I'm the harshest critic of me. I want to revel in my worst, from my hatred of normal people to my lowball dark humour, I want to sit on my throne of the worst years of my time on earth, not of motherhood and the automatic blessings of submitting myself to a husband and his god.