where have those days gone?

(As must happen at least once every year, I was reading the old posts, feeling nostalgic, and thinking.)

I think you're a different person every second, every shift. I've been a million people before, each in its own turn embodied, explored, discarded. Seemingly gone. As I read, thoug, I feel as if I'm slipping back into those old skins, one by one. Becoming those old selves again, but in acceleration.

The best, or worst, thing about doing that is that I can feel the changes of my heart as time passed and things came. I can feel my hopes dying one by one. My smile twisting a little with doubt, every week, every day.

It seems so sad, watching the transition of my words, and the transformation of life that that suggests. The shift from guile to cold realisation, from ignorance to understanding--then: the way I could exalt everything I loved in the slightest, to now: how I never even speak of the joys now, always lamenting. I used to cheer at the onset of March holidays. Revel in the thought of playing basketball. Look at a terrible self-written story and believe it was excellent.

Where has it gone? Where has it flown? I'll never have it back, isn't that so? Things change too fast, faster than I can even begin to see, like a fluttering shadow that vanishes around the corner of a skyscraper.

Now I know why the innocence of childhood is one of the most tragic, most precious things in the world. When I was twelve, I swore I'd never let that instant wonder, that certain joy, go. I swore I'd never be like those 'emo teenagers' who hated the world and hated their parents and hated running through parks and tasting the air.

But that's precisely what I am now, isn't it? Cooped up in a corner whenever I'm at home. Afraid of the sun, almost. It drained out of me. Life changed me; life taught me. Maybe it was peer pressure or expectation. I morphed to suit the image they pictured of me.

But it's done, and I let a treasure go without a second thought. This is the pain of remembering. Just like how, as a child, I used to gaze upwards through that frosted lens in the ceiling, and wonder what the future I didn't yet know existed there--I'm gazing backwards at those times, like a passer-by through the façade of an antique shop...

As I read, I'm looking back upon myself, me with those wide and ready and earnest eyes. I'm watching someone who doesn't know what to expect. Me before the voyage began. I'm looking at a child who knew she'd look back someday, who decided there and then to keep a record of her 'now' for her future self. For me.

We're the same person, but that's so hard to believe. I look like an airheaded fangirl there. I'm the other extreme now. It awes me, how such transformations happen. It really does. I'm not sure if it should sadden me, but sadden me it does. All the same.

crying till you can cry no more

So March is ending. Yesterday was my birthday, and I got fewer birthday presents than ever. But also the most meaningful. Because last year it was easy to find people who would remember your birthday because there was a class birthday list. This year, though, the presents came from the people who genuinely remembered, because the day means something to them.

The rest greeted me on Facebook, and I'm utterly grateful for those too. But well, the smaller number of personally-presented gifts only serves to make them more valuable.

---

So March is ending, and today definitely goes in my top 30 worst days since I left Primary School. I flunked a Chem quiz because I slept too little and panicked because I couldn't get my mind into the right state. Then someone in class nicely hurt my feelings, and while I don't think she meant to, it widened an already-open wound. I cried three quarters of GP away in the toilet. Ok, I'm whiny, but isn't it justified? Or is it not? Why are my standards so screwed up?

And thereafter, to top things off, I lost my wallet. Oh, my wallet with my booking slip and bus ticket collections. And my library card, my EZ-link card, almost 200 dollars, and...the wallet itself. Possibly the prettiest wallet I've ever had the privilege to own.

I had to miss lunch, and stayed back in school for 2 hours just looking for it. Ultimately futilely. And now my plans for tomorrow are screwed up, because I'm going to have to, on top of losing $170+, spend even MORE money taking public transport with coins. Standard Tickets KILL.

I think I can recover. Maybe I can. But it's going to take a long time to forget the sting of losing $170. My bus ticket collection will have to start over. The letter from Grace is gone. So is a major part of my RGS memories: my bookings.

I really could cry more, I feel. But I've already cried all the tears out. I'm empty like a drought-stricken plain.

---

The only upside to today, really, was fourth block break today. And really, it's almost enough to fill my day up again. HT wasn't there, sadly (we did meet her at the end though) but AF was, along with an entire bunch of RI guys whom we've befriended since entering RJ. Of all things we could have, we discussed programming rules, some teacher's terrible math skills, and logic. Yes, I couldn't ask for better company.

'That is an appeal to logic. I refute logic.'

You know what, all considered, I think the guys here are nowhere near as bad as I thought they'd be when school began. Some do fit my idea of 'the typical guy'. But thanks to Facebook and Aofei, I've found the suitably atypical guys I'm not against befriending. Namely the sorta-weird, not-really-macho, and FRIGHTENINGLY SMART ones.

And those are the very same people I'll be meeting again tomorrow for combined birthday celebrations. Then will come Astro day, which, despite taking up a perfectly good holiday, I don't mind attending at all.

I want to sleep early today. Get my head back. Work out my chem test and find out of I'm stupid, or if it was really panic.

diamonds

People are surprising creatures. They're never the way we think they are on first glance, and that's why I'm never willing to hate a person from first encounter.

I gain a new feature, a facet, with every experience I pass. So do you, so does she. That's why I like to learn more, search further, ask. What are your parents' occupations, which is your favourite season, how do you memorise lists. You have a different reason for each of your answers to those three questions, and your answers to those three questions could be reasons for other things. I know there's so much beneath that surface you present to me and maintain to be the definition 'you', your guard against the strangers. I won't assume that is you, because it can't be.

A person is a web of interconnected tales, not a single one. An epic of ten volumes, not a short story.

---

So I am the same. Would I want them to assume that I'm a Cloud Cuckoolander weirdo who doesn't think straight, just because that's the way I introduce myself when I first meet someone? It might be hard to believe if you don't know me well, but I'm far from 'blur' and without-a-hint and situationally unaware. It's the cover I present because that's the way that comes naturally to me.

Enough time with me, and you'll know I'm a fantasiser, and maybe that's why I'm weird. Search deeper, and you'll know that I'm an emotional, impulsive, somewhat angry and nihilistic person. (I hurt myself, drench myself, engorge myself with water when I reach an emotional/mental BSOD. I make suicide threats left right and centre. I actually begin sometimes--strangulation especially.)

I like stories of the rich and the things they hide, of vast places whose every corner cannot be explored in a singular lifetime. I like to think of journeys and networks. I like to draw maps. Memorise them. Find the links. Sort of like how I like to imagine the human mind itself.

There's a reason to this, to all this hiding, in everyone. I am not myself around people I dislike, people I don't want to acquaint myself with. It's 'classified' information. I'm different around them, versus when I'm around people I like. Yet why do I define 'myself', in this context, as 'the person I behave as when I'm around people I trust'? That person isn't me either. I am again another person for my family, but that is still not me.

Someone said that you're yourself when you're alone. I guess we can judge by that. I'm a creator at her desk. I'm a person who can be trapped in a sheet of paper. When that conditional 'aloneness' is breached while I'm in the middle of an activity reserved for 'alone' time, I am desperate to chase the trespasser away. I am a loner, trying to be social. I'm a wanderer in my mind; I travel wherever my thoughts are able to move. I am a ship-rider. I dream of seeing the other edges of the world, and yet when my parents offer to take us on holiday, I vehemently refuse.

---

We're all multi-faceted, and I like that. What I don't like is that I can't see all those facets at one glance, and that it's easy to make assumptions based on that single view of a soul, only to find myself surprised, often unpleasantly, when I learn of another aspect in suddenness. I have to unearth them, these windows. discover them one by one, and through them learn a little about the world that is housed inside.

why

Why do I feel like you hate me more and more everyday? Why do I feel like everything I feared is suddenly happening, precisely the way I pictured? Is it just me, or do you feel the gap widening too?

needed this badly

In fact, it has been frustrating me from the beginning. Maybe because I feel like you're trying to prove something, and I'm trying to out-prove you. I feel like you're trying to sound amazingly profound, and I don't know why I assume you are, but I feel as if that's what you're doing.

And I hope this is not being harsh, but you don't. Maybe you would to another, but to me, you're just trying very hard to come across as extremely deep. You're not getting there.

democracy...

Hmm, a thought... citizens vote into power the people who embody their principles, right? Therefore the composition of a country's parliament is often a reflection of the people's principles and ideals at that point? (sorry, just phrasing an odd thought that hit me.)

control

I have self control. I need to have self control. There will be no Facebook until I finish my homework everyday. And only one hour a day. It's taking up too much time. Far too much more than is optimum.