Like A Child Lost In The Mall

Art by: Hisashi Eguchi

The world seems so big sometimes.

But no one else seems scared or lost.

No one seems to be stumbling, fidgeting. No one else has eyes lit with fear, with a look that says “Please help me”. I feel like a child lost in a mall whenever I enter the adult world. These places with grey buildings that tower over you, like reprimanding adults.  With their menacing, gleaming facades behind which men and women are watching, judging. The kind of place where people always have somewhere to be and you’re in the way.

I feel like an ambitious, overeager child lost in a world of grown-ups. I wanted to go wander by myself. To explore the great, big world the way a 7-year-old wants to know what happens behind the large, closed doors inside the supermarket where only staff members are allowed. But now that I’m alone, even the shelves have turned into threats. Everything is towering, looming. Even the shadows seem darker.

And have you noticed? There never seems to be 2 lost kids in one store at the same time. I’m alone, just drifting. Worry inflating with each step, hoping people won’t notice that I don’t know where I’m going. That I’m only in their way because I can’t find mine.

It is then that I feel like I am just masquerading. Just playing dress-up. Like I put on my father’s shoes to impersonate efficiency and, in too predictable ways, quickly stumbled and crashed. Because I can’t fill shoes this big with feet this small.

Small, small. I feel so small.

But I am learning that the only reason why there are never 2 kids lost in one store is that both are continually hiding from the other. Always pretending that they know where they’re going. For fear that they are the only ones who don’t.

But I know better now.  I have seen my friends hide their small, shaking selves behind bold makeup and clacking shoes. Or somewhere off-camera, in Instagram photos of their coffee and car keys.

And I have understood that age shouldn’t be used as a measure for growth. That, at 27 (which seems like a lot, even when you’re 21), you can still feel no older than 17. The thing with age is that it goes on without you. Like a train you’re running to catch but that flies by too fast. And yet, you’re still expected to make it on time.

(I wondered today, how many 17 year olds were living in 27 year old bodies.)

The point is, you can be 30, 40, and still feel like a child.

We’re all playing dress-up. We’re all trying and fidgeting. It’s alright. It’s alright to fumble with your things at 23, to not have a stable relationship by 25, to still stutter out your food order at 30, and to feel intimidated by other people at 35.

No one’s ever fully grown up, anyway.

 

 

 

A Smooth Sea…(1/2)

Art by: Huebucket

On the cusp of adulthood, at the end of the paved road, standing before a cliff with nowhere else to go, a silhouette strangely like mine. A person who keeps looking back to where she came from. You would think, with how much that poor soul is trembling, that there was a pirate’s sword being pushed into her back and merciless waters at her feet. And between them, only a feeble wooden plank soon to be pulled from under her feet if she doesn’t jump first.

I just try to imagine that moment. The lead sinking down in the stomach, stretching it so it reaches even the feet. The roar in the ears, the voices chanting to jump! jump! Being pushed out of a ship that has kept you safe from many a storm before, as you hid deep inside the ship’s belly and listened to Nature wreaking havoc, feeling the sudden, jerky undertow rocking the vessel. But now, on a stormy night, it is your turn. Tonight, you face the storm.

…jump! jump! jump!

Finally, a breath, sharp and something you feel even amidst all the fear and screams.

…jump! jump! jump!

Weightlessness, a brief moment of apnea, of bracing yourself, closing up all you can.

Some people choose to walk until they no longer feel the wood beneath them. They walk until the only other option is to fall. But some take up the chance to build up speed, to run and launch themselves ahead, into the night, into the unknown.

And when you finally hit the water and the first drop splashes, everything around you dies down. The screams and chants fade, there is only freezing water sloshing around, clamping around you like a fist, and a depth underneath you that keeps sucking you in. Your heart is beating so hard and fast it feels like a fish caught in a net, trying to fight its way out.

At this point, you either black out or you…

TO BE CONTINUED

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Note: This is Day 23 (!!!!!!) of my little NaNoWriMo Writing Challenge. This story is a two-part one (Although actually, maybe it’ll turn into a three-part thing, who knows). You can also read my entry for Day 22 here. And if you liked this story, I’ve also written about this kind of ocean theme before, which you can find here, here and also here. (What can I say, I like the ocean). 

 

 

Childhood

Sculpture by: Alexander Milov • Photograph by: Vitaliy Deynega

“Wait! Wait for me! Where are you going?” cried the little one, running up to the vanishing silhouette. 

“Why are you going so fast? Don’t—don’t leave me…You said we’d always be together!”

“Where I’m going,” said the taller one, stopping to kneel besides the other, “you can’t follow. I need to go alone.”

“But you have to take me with you! You have to! You said it that if we weren’t together then, then it doesn’t mean anything. If I’m not with you, you’ll let yourself become sad.” whimpered the child.

“Childhood,” murmured the other, a melancholic smile tugging at their mouth and one hand ruffling the child’s hair, “I would have let myself become sad a long time ago if you hadn’t been there. I would have lost my way, I would have lost you and I would have lost me.” The older one’s voice was now watery, tremulous. “And not having you, I will surely get a little lost, but I’m doing it for you. I can’t bring you this time around. They don’t like children where I’m going. They’ll hurt you. But I’ll always remember you.

I am here because of you, you know? If there’s no you, there’s no me. I’ll come back for you, I promise.”

If You Are Waiting For “Something”

 

Art by: Heo Jiseon

It is 1 a.m. and I am sitting under the stars.

I am 20 or 21, I’m not sure; Time has stopped mattering.

There’s a whiff of sadness in the night, I wonder if you can catch it? Yet here I am still, an idiot, looking at the stars and thinking of you. I don’t even know who ‘you’ are. A mirage. A daydream. A feeling I am holding onto because if I don’t then nothing else matters. ‘You’ are like a mix of a face I lost in a crowd once and a person who has visited my thoughts in that time between sleep and wakefulness. Evasive. Haunting.

And yet, I am not entirely sure ‘you’ are ‘someone’. Maybe ‘you’ are something else entirely. Maybe ‘you’ are a calling. Maybe ‘you’ are a whisper from the past, or a novel that will change my world. Or an epiphany or a sunset. Or stars. Or maybe you’re the person I want to be. I don’t know, but I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for you to happen.

I might be a little drunk on the dizzying freedom of the cool night air. Drunk on the mystery of who or what ‘you’ could be. So drunk that all these problems braided tightly into my hair have stopped straining so hard.

It’s 1 a.m. or 5:30 in the evening; I am not sure. I know nothing but that I am a soul, waiting, waiting, waiting…

And the odd thought crosses my mind that maybe you are waiting for me too.

(And so we will never find each other.)

The Promise of Youth

Gif from: Howl’s Moving Castle

This beautiful life is no longer without consequence. Time has begun taking its toll out on you, dear. The late nights are now mapped out on your face, the sorrow weighing down the skin under your eyes. The memories of us have turned into sadness, who would have known?

Who would have known that one day on a roadtrip with no destination would change us so? You see, not even Youth is without consequence. Every happiness is to be paid for. So now we are sad adults, you and me, experiencing not Life, but the drudgery of everydays, reminiscing. Reminiscing about a pair of teenagers, wild and eternal, whose footsteps echo ever so briefly in the hollows of our chests.

Perhaps this is grief. Perhaps this is regret.

Because we killed them. The people we used to be. The dreams we used to have. We gave in to the world. We bowed to the storm and let it strip us of all we were.

So we go through this cruel existence, paying the penance for our crimes with unhappiness and misery. If you are miserable, then their deaths will mean something, right? If you feel hollowed out, soulless, then it is because you deserve to be, right?

Right?

But even now you appear right when I have scrubbed my memories clean of you. In the supermarket, outside a café. Grocery bags in hand. Sadness in your eyes. And for a moment there, I see the spark of the 17-year old you used to be. I see this tingle of Life that wants to awaken. And for a brief minute, Life allows us this repose. This breath of Youth that erases the fine lines and the great walls alike. And all disappears. As though Life had an undo button, a ‘restore to previous version’ option that could take us back to that summer when we were 17. Where the sunlight was warm on our faces and our days were boundless. The grass was tall, and the pink carnations swayed in the wind as the nearby brook ran its course.

But you chose, long ago. So you turn your head and in a heartbeat, take the sunlight away with you.

Cup of Life, Anyone?

The tea leaves swirl in the old porcelain cup, Her wrinkled hand, darkened from long hours in the sun, energetically draws circles of steam in the air as She tries to infuse the dried, blackened leaves in the boiling water.

In the old days, She would often predict your future after one hard look at the remains once you’d had your cup.

But right now, I cannot think of futures. I am the leaves twirling inside the hot water. I am losing my essence, and all of me is becoming undone in the stifling heat, in the dizzying turns the cup takes and the growing tornado threatening to gulp me whole.

Storm in a teacup, Life in a nutshell.

I am being stirred, dissolved into something else. They hope to take the elixir that hides beneath the obsidian-clad body and then discard what is left of it.

Squeeze the soul out, throw the body away. It’s a consumerist society. Fast-food, fast-everything.

So now, She tosses the tea leaves in the bin even before the old, knowing eye can even take a look.

Figuring Out Who You Are

 

Art by Gunseli Sepici

You toss and turn the night away,
as if hoping that the movement will
cause all that’s wrong inside,
to finally fall back into place.

You’re restless, breathless and hopeless.
And I want to say: “You don’t have to be.”
Because it is when disassembling the pieces of a Lego house
that you have enough parts to create a bigger one.

Everything doesn’t have to be in place all the time,
else it means that things have never moved,
that they have never changed.
But you, you want to evolve.
You want to grow.
You want to be a better you.

So embrace the messiness.
Make out with the idea that you’re a work-in-progress.
We all are.
It’s just that some of us are building foundations,
and others are redoing the paint.
But even then, you never know when
you’ll want to knock the whole thing down
and start all over again.

 

Adult Life Is Hard

It is here again, this feeling that makes me want to flee.

Back to the hearty breakfasts, the sounds of honest laughter, Grandma’s hugs and the sweets that would drop from her hand to yours under the table. Days of simple happiness and sadness wiped away with a single kiss.

Adult life is so cold. It is a time when even dreams become burdens that stack up on your back. Dreams depress more than they encourage. They serve as reminders of all you have not accomplished, because you’re what, 20, 23? And you’re nowhere near where you thought you would be. Nothing is going to plan, nothing is going right. You don’t even know what you want to be and somewhere along the way, you’ve lost sight of who you even wanted to be. Now it’s just deadlines and survival. You have to work but you’re young so you also have to have fun but you’re also supposed to fall in love now so that you can get married at the right age later. And then there are also those dark feelings that inhabit you and that you don’t really know how to deal with.

But somehow, all your friends seem to be doing fine, judging by all those Instagram posts. They have internships, and they’ve even started their own companies, and you’re just here, with all this fire in you that you don’t know what to do with and you’re trying, trying, flailing pathetically at this point. Anything. You would do anything to just move forward a little. But the most depressing thing is that it actually feels like you are doing anything, everything and somehow nothing all at once. But the Universe just doesn’t want to acknowledge that. It’s like the Universe just wants to blow away that flame within you, to extinguish that fire you hold.

But it’ll be okay. Things are always more difficult in the moment than in retrospect, you’ll do better, you’ll get better. Your luck will turn, and your work will pay off. It has to, right?

At 18 (Disillusioned Dreamer)

Illustration Credits: Gabriel Picolo picolo-kun.deviantart.com

You are 18. An adult. You have begged not to be. But you realise that you either get old, or you die.

So now you are 18 and the world you have known for 18 years minus one day is crumbling down. It feels as though not just adults, but the world in general, have been plotting against you and planting explosives all over the place, waiting for 18 years to pass.

And now, you’re having to escape that exploding world, your exploding world, and leap into another foreign, hostile land, all the while unsure you’ll make it or die trying.

And you can’t even look back.

You can’t look back to take in, one last time, the sight of your favourite teddy bear, or the worn copy of “The Little Prince” that you keep — kept. Because it’s all debris now. If you turn to look, you’ll blind yourself.

So you jump.

Not with much of a choice, afraid of the leap, afraid of falling and afraid of reaching the ‘new world’ all at once. And you’re so afraid that you wish that someone would take your hand. But now, you’re afraid of trusting too. Now, it seems that all you trust is yourself, but even then, not really.

You make it to the new world.

Bruised. Battered. Ugly. Crying. Numb.
Suits, ties and grim expressions abound. The world is grey, and no one cares. People bustle around and they don’t seem to want to notice that you’re weak and lying on the sidewalk.

The only happy ones are the drunks. But even then, not for long.

Someone reaches out for you and reflexively, you think it is a helping hand. But it’s not. Hands, you learn from then on, are either for stealing or harming.

But still, as desperate and dreadful as you feel, you think 20.
At 20, you’ll do it.
20.

When You Aren’t What You’re Supposed To Be (Part 1)

Illustration Credits: https://www.facebook.com/elesqart/

He looked at them with an ugly, uncertain kind of emotion.

They were talking, the lot of them, about things he had only dreamed of.

The shortest one was speaking of his latest travels, while his brother enthused over his newest job. Next to him was the one who had always been soft at heart, always with stars in his eyes, and now even more so as he spoke timidly of a girl who was more beautiful than all the stars and moons. And then beside him, was the tough one of the group; the rebel during their school days, who would somehow manage to come up either with mischief or with a new tattoo or piercing every other week or so. He was listening, with a look of uncharacteristic fondness as his friend talked about that girl he swore did not belong to this world.

“And you?”

Silence fell on the group as the question was asked. And it suddenly felt like they were all looking at him, all waiting, expecting.

And him, what about him?

His life, in truth, was a mess of empty coffee cups, half-written novels and sleepless nights spent wondering about the meaning of his existence.

But he couldn’t say that, could he?

And me, what about me?

And then, at that moment…

Envy.

That was it, that was the ugliness that had been growing in him. It had fallen on him like a drop of ink on a white sheet of paper, and then it had spread and spread and spread…